The biggest need for the moderation system is...
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Moderation Ideas
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· Score: 1
History.
I've said before that I believe moderation is the most important thing that slashdot has done. It's great. I hope that detailed archives are being kept, though -- because moderation (or ratings, or whatever you want to call it) is going to be one of the most important key ideas of the 'net.
So -- it's vital to keep records. Find out things like "do trolls decrease when moderating occurs?" or "How does karma vary over time?" or whatever. The important thing, though, is to keep the raw data so that questions that can't be formulated now can be answered in the future.
Now, of course, it would be ideal if these records could be blinded somehow, so that they could be made public in the future. But I'd be happy just to know that detailed archives were being kept -- even if I never had access to the information.
If you think about it, there is a resource that is being underutilized here. I believe that most moderators invest quite a bit of agony and effort in their valuations, and that sweat could be used to fertilize other things than merely the articles they moderate. If I really wanted to go off the deep end, I would say that judgement, or valuation, or moderation, is the key to intelligence -- and there is a database of intelligent judgement here that could be quite valuable. Maybe not now that/. is small, but when there are millions of readers and hundreds of thousands of moderations daily...
I disagree with the idea of hiding scores when moderating. When I moderate, I try to invest my points in posts that I feel are not scored as well as they should be. I look for AC posts that are still at 0 and really should be higher. I'd hate to waste the few points I have on something that's already a +5.
I don't have my copy of the first edition of Applied Cryptography with me, but as I recall Schneier is basically an amateur cryptographer. When he started writing Applied Cryptography he knew very little about it -- and while he learned a tremendous amount as he wrote it -- he has no formal training in the field. Formal training isn't everything [read the very entertaining 'Between Silk and Cyanide' for another amateur's good work,] I wouldn't view Schneier's credentials as impeccable.
If I recall correctly, there are several warnings in AC (at least the first edition) warning against using the work of amateurs.
That said, Blowfish and Twofish do seem to have passed muster with world-class cryptographers, which is a tremendous achievement; and I have tremendous respect for Schneier.
I completely agree, and for basically the same reasons -- that I read slashdot differently if I am moderating. It's something that I give back to the community, in return for getting to read at '2' when I'm busy. I'd go further to say that I'd like to get moderator access only every now and then -- say, a few times a month. It's great, it's fun to search for the hidden pearls -- but it's work too. Finally, I have to say that I'm amazed that this moderation works. I've seen no moderation work anywhere else on the 'net. On the other hand, I've seen it kill communities with astonishing force. This group moderation is the 'great idea' of slashdot. thad
Evans & Sutherland made some truly wonderful machines called the Picture System and Picture System II in the late 70s, and early 80s. They made some of the first frame buffers too. We had a couple of Picture Systems (vector-based graphics machines) and six of the frame buffers at NYIT.
The E&S machines, like the SGI machines, had wonderfully low-level graphics libraries. You could easily code up small programs, and build the complexity yourself -- exactly like IrisGL and OpenGL. [The fact that Jim Clark, founder of SGI, was at NYIT at the time is surely just a coincidence.]
Then E&S made their Picture System 300. It was an advance in many ways -- it was color, it drew vectors much faster than the PS2, it was better in almost every respect except one. The only way that you could talk to the machine was this incredibly arcane dataflow language. Now, dataflow was a programming phase that was popular then (sort of like C++ now:)) but it was a disaster. Very few PS 300s were sold (at least to graphics research and production companies) because you couldn't get to the guts of the machine, you couldn't make it do what you wanted. You could only make it do what E&S thought that you wanted.
Low level libraries are really key. OpenGL is better than Direct3D. OpenGL is better than PHIGS. OpenGL is better than Inventor (and I helped write Inventor.) Let the user build the data structures and controls that suit her. Amazingly few people get this.
I love SGI. I've bought a million dollars worth of their little machines for visual effects/computer graphics production. I even went to work there for a while, because I thought that they could change the graphics world for the better.
You know what's coming, don't you. The 'but'
But, I agree that SGI's future is quite gloomy. There were two things I heard yesterday that cemented it for me.
1. A friend of mine sells SGIs to people like me. He sold $12 million a couple of years ago, and $1.2 million last year.
2. There was a 'meet the CEO' meeting for resellers. You know, the people you actually buy SGI machines from. It was held at the same time and place as a SUN reseller meeting. SGI went so far as to raffle off one of their new Intel boxes to get people to attend. Less than 10 people showed up to see Belluzzo, in a room that would have seated hundreds. Can you imagine what it must have felt like to Belluzzo? Any question that when Microsoft came calling with millions of shares of stock options that he jumped ship? Meanwhile, at the next-door SUN reseller meeting, there were hundreds of people.
I love SGI -- and I think that they have some truly great people. A lot of people have left, it's true, but some of the best remain. But they've got to find a way to apply those people to a mission that makes economic sense.
I'll keep my O2's for at least the next several years, and will continue to buy them (used, really amazingly cheap) until I can find a Linux box that has the speed, flexibility, video, and graphics performance of an O2. My guess is that it will be another year or so before that happens -- the graphics will get there probably by the end of this year. I have all the tools ported already (it's not that big a deal, really) so we'll be able to make the leap when the time comes.
I agree that Government has no business doing something like this. This is what
cults
do.
To remain a Scientologist in good standing, one had to install the Scientology net-nanny program, which blocks access to all sites critical of Scientology, or contain names of Scientology critics (like me). Check out this great Salon article
It's amazing that this can be held up to redicule when it's a cult, but accepted when it's a government.
My favorite book on VLIW is 'Bulldog: A Compiler for VLIW Architecture' by John R. Ellis. It's out of print, unfortunately, but it should be in your University library.
It describes the first VLIW system and the compiler that made it work. This was a machine from a company called Multiflow (RIP). The book starts out good and just gets better, as all the pitfalls and problems of creating a good parallelizing compiler are examined. The book is very well written, too -- easy to understand and fun.
The most astonishing parts of the project (to me) was just how hard it was to get relatively optimized programs for VLIW machines. The Bulldog compiler took *hours* to run on reasonably sized programs. Now, this was a few years ago, and typical workstations are now much faster -- but programs have gotten bigger, too.
No -- that's not true. Microsoft has said that they will not support future Windows 2000 on Alpha. They will support Alpha NT4 up through something called Service Pack 6, but that's it.
Microsoft operating systems development on Alpha is over.
I published our morph algorithm while I was at PDI, (the Michael Jackson video Black or White was done with this, among hundreds of other production jobs). We published to prevent it from being patented by somebody else.
Just for fun, we also patented something, just to see how hard it is. Basically, it is an exercise in t-crossing and i-dotting -- the patent office is completely clueless. We got a patent that probably should not have been granted because we followed the procedure.
We did both of these things in response to a lawsuit threatened by New York Institute of Technology. You see, they had patented 3D keyframe animation. And the patent looked reasonably solid, there was no way that we could get around it. They had even cited almost all of the prior art that we thought invalidated the patent...and because of that we couldn't use that against them. They had sent letters to us, to Electric Image, to Wavefront, many of the players in computer graphics at the time.
The one piece of prior art that they hadn't cited was an NYIT document. It was presented at the Siggraph conference on August 4, 1982. The patent was filed August 3, 1983. You recall from the above comment that you have one year to file, and it appeared that they had sneaked in.
But...after six months of fighting this, I realized that while the paper was presented on Tuesday -- the proceedings were available on Sunday, the 2nd. A year plus a day. And so the series of increasingly threatening letters from NYIT stopped with a thunderous silence.
We probably could have made a few million from our morph algorithm (as others later did) but I still feel that we did the right thing. thad
Apparently there is some fairly well established law on 'Trade Dress', that this lawsuit is filed under. Makes me wanna puke, but apparently they have a case.
Re:No X -- we need a media-savvy, compositing GUI
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Is X The Future?
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· Score: 1
Short, witty, caustic, and just not true. IRIX will exist on MIPS processors for at least the next 8 years.
SGI is committed to Linux for Intel processor-based machines, of which there will be quite a few. SGI is also going to be running IRIX for a long time.
I was at SGI when they adopted X (over the previous NeWS) and it was a nightmare -- but it was the right thing to do. Nobody regrets it. And, with the DRI that SGI supported at PI, you will get fast graphics and X at the same time. thad
In fact, Time Domain has a long and sordid history of announcing products that they can't deliver. If you read their web page it is full of spectacular pulse radio technology that never seems to materialize. They have plenty of excuses (The government is suppressing us! Livermore has patented everything! It only works if we're doing the test!) but never have delivered.
It's too bad, too, because I'd like to believe in them! The idea of an undectable, unjammable, milliwatt radio that works over a hundred miles is enticing. Ultra-wideband radars that detect anything is exciting. These things should be possible, but are hard to realize.
There's a company called Aetherwire that was mentioned in/. a few months ago. They've actually got some reasonable working pulse-radio hardware.
1) When asked "How many people here are from Microsoft?" nobody raised their hands. Jon Leech said "I suspect a couple of you are fibbing...but anyway..." and then went off into the rest of the meeting.
2) Kurt Akeley from SGI, one of the two or three people most responsible for OpenGL, spoke passionately about Linux, OpenGL, and how SGI is going to work with both of them. He said that "A win for Linux is a win for SGI". Now, somebody else saying that would have just been more platitudes, but Akeley has the authority to back it up. He's committed to making Linux a true contender in 3D, and is putting SGI behind that.
Finally, the fun of seeing all my fellow Linux/OpenGL enthusiasts overflowing a pretty big conference room was heartening. Siggraph is so big that 300 or so people can get lost, but all together in one room it felt like an avalanche was just getting started.
One of the remarkably few papers presented by Microsoft at this year's Siggraph conference was on watermarking of models. The idea of watermarking, of course, is to embed some signature of the creator of the actor/model/whatever in the object itself, in a way that is robust. Hughes Hoppe, along with Emil Praun and Adam Finkelstein of Princeton, did indeed come up with a way of doing so that is all those things, by copying (extending? embracing?) a technique from the audio and image watermarking body of knowledge -- he encoded the watermark in the most salient features of the model, at various frequencies. The author of the model saves the original model, the watermark parameters, and releases the watermarked model to the customer. An interesting part of this, though, is that the watermarking algorithm -- or in this case -- the parameters passed to the algorithm, must be secret or it would be trivial to defeat. Furthermore, there is an interesting question when it comes to proving that someone has stolen the model. The original author must produce both the original model, and the watermark algorithm, to verify to the rest of the world that the suspect model is indeed a copy. Now, I would expect Microsoft (say) to object to this -- because if they release the details of the algorithm then anybody could defeat it. On the other hand, are you going to trust the alleged owner of the original when he says "Oh yes, the watermark demonstrates that it's my model. I'm sorry, but I cannot prove this to you." Even if they do that, it is difficult (though not impossible) to conceive of a watermarking system that doesn't allow post-hoc watermarking; that is, generation of a 'original' from the suspect copy. Hoppe does note this in his article, but it's just in passing. Finally, for you other Microsoft-haters out there, in Future Work Hoppe includes "an automated agent such as a web crawler to search for possible stolen watermarked documents." Here's the article
Microsoft doesn't look all that far ahead in some ways, but in pricing models they do look a long way out. I think that they are not asking "why rent when you can own?", but rather "Can we get them to rent instead of steal?" They have to lower the cost of acquisition, to eliminate the motive for stealing/copying/liberating the software. I would be much more likely to steal a $500 ap than something that costs $1/use, especially if I don't intend to use it very often. It's interesting, too, to think about what this might mean overseas. Piracy is even more common there. Finally, the nice thing about renting is that it would be possible to prevent people from reverse-engineering or making compatible products, because there's a moving target. One could always break compatibility with anything at any time. I've heard no end of horror stories about people upgrading X and then Y not working due to incompatible DLLs. If these could be updated on the fly, at any time, then people would stop trying to write compatible software. thad
Also note that there are several school boards in California, most notably one in sububan San Diego, that has become dominated by religious right wing nuts. They have been voting to deny all federal funds for local education, apparently trying to destroy the public schools in favor of private (read parochial) schools. It's really quite amazing. School board elections might be followed a little more closely in the future.
It describes how SGI is laying off and transferring a bunch of the Advanced System Division engineers. ASD is the heart and soul of SGI, and has been for a decade. It will be interesting to see what they say next Tuesday, but their actions are pretty revealing. Many engineers are being transfered to NVidia...recall that SGI reached some sort of deal with NVidia in the last couple of weeks about intellectual property.
The article says that the changes are designed to help their more profitable Intel workstations instead of their older Mips-based machines. Now, this of course flies in the face of reality, that the Intel machines lost a ton of money, but the Mips machines made enough that the entire company turned a profit. Of course, reality is a crutch for those who are not cut out to be Marketing Managers.
The article also confirms that the Fahrenheit initiative is being cut back. This is tremendously good news. Fahrenheit was supposed to be a follow-on to OpenGL, Inventor, and Performer -- it is a joint venture with Microsoft. I cannot imagine any input that Microsoft could have on OpenGL to make it better; even without the wretched example of Direct3D. If Fahrenheit was just a bone thrown to Microsoft to distract them from attacking OpenGL -- as it appears to me -- then I give SGI a lot of credit.
In articles a month or so ago, the announcement of the reorganization was going to happen today, the 5th, instead of the 10th. Their stockholder meeting, which used to be in August when I worked there, is now Oct. 27th.
Read the above article mentioned C|Net article, it's chock full of good information.
I work with SGIs too at my visual effects company, we have 10 SGIs and two Linux boxes, an Intel and an Alpha.
SGIs have been the best machines to get the job done for at least the last 12 years, they were fast, easy to program, reasonably well engineered boxes that came from a company committed to graphics.
Still, I expect to be running on Linux very soon on all of our machines. I'm sure that the previous author will acknowledge that machines don't live very long in the FX business, any more than they do anywhere else. The particular boxes that I have will become uncompetitive in a year or so, and we'll need to buy something else.
Those will certainly be Linux boxes. If they could be SGI Linux boxes, that'd be great. But to assume that you will be running IRIX in the future is optimistic, if not foolhardy. Diversifying into another (somewhat more common) operating system is prudent.
The biggest reason that people aren't going to want to move away from IRIX is, of course, the proprietary animation software that they have for those old boxes. One would hope that these tools will be ported to Linux in the not-to-distant future; I'm sure that we'll hear more about that at Siggraph next week. All of the big software companies that I've talked to at least claim to be porting.
I've found that porting an SGI OpenGL application to Linux to be almost trivial. Sadly, I've written a bunch of IRIS GL programs, too, and they are much more of a challenge. But, I should be done soon, and we'll be ready for whatever happens.
[I'm giving away Linux version of some of our most popular programs, at least for the next year. Check them out at http://www.hammerhead.com/linux/linux.html ]
Piracy cannot be stopped by goon squads, even in this country; piracy is too easy, and the number of pirates can easily number in the millions. You cannot use force to stop it.
I heard a story on NPR a while back, saying that 10% of the jobs in this country are protected only by copyright, and it makes sense. Certainly my company, Hammerhead Productions, is dependent on people paying money to go see movies.
The movie business is in for a terrible fall, though, if they don't work very hard to make people want to respect the copyright. I see no effort whatsoever being expended in that area. The financial articles about movies today, if anything, would encourage piracy -- as they tend to describe the fabulous fortunes being made by the top actors, producers, and directors. Nothing will make one want to pirate more than feeling that one's hard-earned money is going to fatten some undeserving persons wallet. Studios are going to have to find ways to demonstrate the contributions made by the huge majority of the people who work on films, other than just racing their credits by at the end of a film. The carpenters in the world might identify with the grips, the advertising writers with the script supervisors... There has to be an identification with the people involved.
If the film industry is as clueless as they appear, though, we'll end up unable to finance films with budgets of millions of dollars any longer. Perhaps we'll end up with a film industry like the current porno [video only] industry.
To take another lesson from the Chinese, we live in interesting times.
Karin Spaink, a net activist in the Netherlands, was recently found to have infringed copyright by providing a link to a admitted copyright infringing page. Now, this is a little different in several ways, but a relatively clueful court did find that a link could be infringing in and of itself.
I agree that control of content is the most important overlooked aspect of this debate. Several posters have commented on the other issues, and to me, it's a tossup.
Except for the control of content.
There was an article in the paper a year or so ago, that noted that @Home was silently terminating streaming video after 10 minutes. For all I know, that's in their Terms of Service. The reason that they did that, obviously, was that streaming video competed with the cable companies main business, which is to say, TV.
It's easy to imagine several other similar restrictions that could be unilaterally imposed after the fact. For example, the cable-modem monopoly could sell your clickstreams to advertisers. "Hey, we have to do this to provide great service at low cost!" They might put content restrictions on the service; from pornography to competing ideological viewpoints.
Now, of course you are saying "No they couldn't!" But why? They have a monopoly. They have no regulation. And they'd make more money. That means that it will happen. I believe that you either have to open access to cable (stealing, or buying, the cable companies admitted investment) or you'll have very pervasive regulation of what the cable modem companies are allowed to do as ISPs. Personally, I find the former choice less distasteful.
I worked with Paul Strauss, Rikk Carey, et al, on Iris Inventor back in '92 and '93, and enjoyed the work, the people, the environment, and the project -- although now I consider the idea of a toolkit at the level Inventor was designed to fill an impossible goal, once a toolkit is powerful enough to fulfiill the requirements of Inventor, it circumscribes the problems that it can solve.
Anyway, I talked to Paul Strauss at last year's Siggraph in Orlando, and he told me not to worry, that Fahrenheit wouldn't replace OpenGL (which I believe is amazingly good); and that the Microsoft people were behaving appropriately, that is, they had reasonable respect for SGI's experience in 3D graphics libraries.
Still, it's been a year, and I have seen no progress whatsoever toward these new libraries. Perhaps there is internal 'Developer's Program' documentation to which I am not privy.
I note with some amusement that the only question posed and not answered at
http://www.sgi.com/software/performer/faq.html
is "How does IRIS Performer relate to the Fahrenheit Project?" Every other question in the table of contents is answered below.
I'm sure that I'll find out what the current status of Fahrenheit is at Siggraph in LA next month, I hope that my prayers are answered and Fahrenheit was just a bone tossed to Microsoft, that will be buried in the backyard and never seen again:)
They don't talk about it too much, but I believe that SGI is funding PI in their DRI effort. Also, SGI open-sourced GLX (their layer between GL and X) back in February, as part of the effort to help Precision Insight (and everybody else) write good Linux OpenGL interfaces.
So, I suspect that SGI is working with PI closely and will use the DRI.
The most shocking thing to me is the how Dave talks about how wonderful open source is, and how great Linux is because of that; but on the other hand completely accepts the insane secrecy at Transmeta. Now, I suppose I'd give my eyeteeth to work there too, but it's an odd juxtaposition that is made odder in that he doesn't seem to notice it himself.
The description of programming for windows is great. I'd had exactly that experience; it's upsetting that OpenGL programs run so much faster under windows than Linux. Still, for the FX work that we do, it's much more important to have real operating system support than fast graphics.
And finally, I agree that the integration of X window system support for games is extremely important; not for the success of the games as for the success of the X window system. If we make X work for games, it will work for anything -- and there will be cards and other hardware that will almost magically appear due to the awesome economic power of the gamers.
Slashdot Mirror
I've said before that I believe moderation is the most important thing that slashdot has done. It's great. I hope that detailed archives are being kept, though -- because moderation (or ratings, or whatever you want to call it) is going to be one of the most important key ideas of the 'net.
So -- it's vital to keep records. Find out things like "do trolls decrease when moderating occurs?" or "How does karma vary over time?" or whatever. The important thing, though, is to keep the raw data so that questions that can't be formulated now can be answered in the future.
Now, of course, it would be ideal if these records could be blinded somehow, so that they could be made public in the future. But I'd be happy just to know that detailed archives were being kept -- even if I never had access to the information.
If you think about it, there is a resource that is being underutilized here. I believe that most moderators invest quite a bit of agony and effort in their valuations, and that sweat could be used to fertilize other things than merely the articles they moderate. If I really wanted to go off the deep end, I would say that judgement, or valuation, or moderation, is the key to intelligence -- and there is a database of intelligent judgement here that could be quite valuable. Maybe not now that /. is small, but when there are millions of readers and hundreds of thousands of moderations daily...
thad
I disagree with the idea of hiding scores when moderating. When I moderate, I try to invest my points in posts that I feel are not scored as well as they should be. I look for AC posts that are still at 0 and really should be higher. I'd hate to waste the few points I have on something that's already a +5.
If I recall correctly, there are several warnings in AC (at least the first edition) warning against using the work of amateurs.
That said, Blowfish and Twofish do seem to have passed muster with world-class cryptographers, which is a tremendous achievement; and I have tremendous respect for Schneier.
thad
I completely agree, and for basically the same reasons -- that I read slashdot differently if I am moderating. It's something that I give back to the community, in return for getting to read at '2' when I'm busy. I'd go further to say that I'd like to get moderator access only every now and then -- say, a few times a month. It's great, it's fun to search for the hidden pearls -- but it's work too. Finally, I have to say that I'm amazed that this moderation works. I've seen no moderation work anywhere else on the 'net. On the other hand, I've seen it kill communities with astonishing force. This group moderation is the 'great idea' of slashdot. thad
The E&S machines, like the SGI machines, had wonderfully low-level graphics libraries. You could easily code up small programs, and build the complexity yourself -- exactly like IrisGL and OpenGL. [The fact that Jim Clark, founder of SGI, was at NYIT at the time is surely just a coincidence.]
Then E&S made their Picture System 300. It was an advance in many ways -- it was color, it drew vectors much faster than the PS2, it was better in almost every respect except one. The only way that you could talk to the machine was this incredibly arcane dataflow language. Now, dataflow was a programming phase that was popular then (sort of like C++ now :)) but it was a disaster. Very few PS 300s were sold (at least to graphics research and production companies) because you couldn't get to the guts of the machine, you couldn't make it do what you wanted. You could only make it do what E&S thought that you wanted.
Low level libraries are really key. OpenGL is better than Direct3D. OpenGL is better than PHIGS. OpenGL is better than Inventor (and I helped write Inventor.) Let the user build the data structures and controls that suit her. Amazingly few people get this.
thad
You know what's coming, don't you. The 'but'
But, I agree that SGI's future is quite gloomy. There were two things I heard yesterday that cemented it for me.
1. A friend of mine sells SGIs to people like me. He sold $12 million a couple of years ago, and $1.2 million last year.
2. There was a 'meet the CEO' meeting for resellers. You know, the people you actually buy SGI machines from. It was held at the same time and place as a SUN reseller meeting. SGI went so far as to raffle off one of their new Intel boxes to get people to attend. Less than 10 people showed up to see Belluzzo, in a room that would have seated hundreds. Can you imagine what it must have felt like to Belluzzo? Any question that when Microsoft came calling with millions of shares of stock options that he jumped ship? Meanwhile, at the next-door SUN reseller meeting, there were hundreds of people.
I love SGI -- and I think that they have some truly great people. A lot of people have left, it's true, but some of the best remain. But they've got to find a way to apply those people to a mission that makes economic sense.
I'll keep my O2's for at least the next several years, and will continue to buy them (used, really amazingly cheap) until I can find a Linux box that has the speed, flexibility, video, and graphics performance of an O2. My guess is that it will be another year or so before that happens -- the graphics will get there probably by the end of this year. I have all the tools ported already (it's not that big a deal, really) so we'll be able to make the leap when the time comes.
thad
- cults
do.To remain a Scientologist in good standing, one had to install the Scientology net-nanny program, which blocks access to all sites critical of Scientology, or contain names of Scientology critics (like me). Check out this great Salon article
It's amazing that this can be held up to redicule when it's a cult, but accepted when it's a government.
thad
It describes the first VLIW system and the compiler that made it work. This was a machine from a company called Multiflow (RIP). The book starts out good and just gets better, as all the pitfalls and problems of creating a good parallelizing compiler are examined. The book is very well written, too -- easy to understand and fun.
The most astonishing parts of the project (to me) was just how hard it was to get relatively optimized programs for VLIW machines. The Bulldog compiler took *hours* to run on reasonably sized programs. Now, this was a few years ago, and typical workstations are now much faster -- but programs have gotten bigger, too.
thad
Microsoft operating systems development on Alpha is over.
thad
Just for fun, we also patented something, just to see how hard it is. Basically, it is an exercise in t-crossing and i-dotting -- the patent office is completely clueless. We got a patent that probably should not have been granted because we followed the procedure.
We did both of these things in response to a lawsuit threatened by New York Institute of Technology. You see, they had patented 3D keyframe animation. And the patent looked reasonably solid, there was no way that we could get around it. They had even cited almost all of the prior art that we thought invalidated the patent...and because of that we couldn't use that against them. They had sent letters to us, to Electric Image, to Wavefront, many of the players in computer graphics at the time.
The one piece of prior art that they hadn't cited was an NYIT document. It was presented at the Siggraph conference on August 4, 1982. The patent was filed August 3, 1983. You recall from the above comment that you have one year to file, and it appeared that they had sneaked in.
But...after six months of fighting this, I realized that while the paper was presented on Tuesday -- the proceedings were available on Sunday, the 2nd. A year plus a day. And so the series of increasingly threatening letters from NYIT stopped with a thunderous silence.
We probably could have made a few million from our morph algorithm (as others later did) but I still feel that we did the right thing. thad
Apparently there is some fairly well established law on 'Trade Dress', that this lawsuit is filed under. Makes me wanna puke, but apparently they have a case.
SGI is committed to Linux for Intel processor-based machines, of which there will be quite a few. SGI is also going to be running IRIX for a long time.
I was at SGI when they adopted X (over the previous NeWS) and it was a nightmare -- but it was the right thing to do. Nobody regrets it. And, with the DRI that SGI supported at PI, you will get fast graphics and X at the same time. thad
It's too bad, too, because I'd like to believe in them! The idea of an undectable, unjammable, milliwatt radio that works over a hundred miles is enticing. Ultra-wideband radars that detect anything is exciting. These things should be possible, but are hard to realize.
There's a company called Aetherwire that was mentioned in /. a few months ago. They've actually got some reasonable working pulse-radio hardware.
1) When asked "How many people here are from Microsoft?" nobody raised their hands. Jon Leech said "I suspect a couple of you are fibbing...but anyway..." and then went off into the rest of the meeting.
2) Kurt Akeley from SGI, one of the two or three people most responsible for OpenGL, spoke passionately about Linux, OpenGL, and how SGI is going to work with both of them. He said that "A win for Linux is a win for SGI". Now, somebody else saying that would have just been more platitudes, but Akeley has the authority to back it up. He's committed to making Linux a true contender in 3D, and is putting SGI behind that.
Finally, the fun of seeing all my fellow Linux/OpenGL enthusiasts overflowing a pretty big conference room was heartening. Siggraph is so big that 300 or so people can get lost, but all together in one room it felt like an avalanche was just getting started.
Thad
One of the remarkably few papers presented by Microsoft at this year's Siggraph conference was on watermarking of models. The idea of watermarking, of course, is to embed some signature of the creator of the actor/model/whatever in the object itself, in a way that is robust. Hughes Hoppe, along with Emil Praun and Adam Finkelstein of Princeton, did indeed come up with a way of doing so that is all those things, by copying (extending? embracing?) a technique from the audio and image watermarking body of knowledge -- he encoded the watermark in the most salient features of the model, at various frequencies. The author of the model saves the original model, the watermark parameters, and releases the watermarked model to the customer. An interesting part of this, though, is that the watermarking algorithm -- or in this case -- the parameters passed to the algorithm, must be secret or it would be trivial to defeat. Furthermore, there is an interesting question when it comes to proving that someone has stolen the model. The original author must produce both the original model, and the watermark algorithm, to verify to the rest of the world that the suspect model is indeed a copy. Now, I would expect Microsoft (say) to object to this -- because if they release the details of the algorithm then anybody could defeat it. On the other hand, are you going to trust the alleged owner of the original when he says "Oh yes, the watermark demonstrates that it's my model. I'm sorry, but I cannot prove this to you." Even if they do that, it is difficult (though not impossible) to conceive of a watermarking system that doesn't allow post-hoc watermarking; that is, generation of a 'original' from the suspect copy. Hoppe does note this in his article, but it's just in passing. Finally, for you other Microsoft-haters out there, in Future Work Hoppe includes "an automated agent such as a web crawler to search for possible stolen watermarked documents." Here's the article
Microsoft doesn't look all that far ahead in some ways, but in pricing models they do look a long way out. I think that they are not asking "why rent when you can own?", but rather "Can we get them to rent instead of steal?" They have to lower the cost of acquisition, to eliminate the motive for stealing/copying/liberating the software. I would be much more likely to steal a $500 ap than something that costs $1/use, especially if I don't intend to use it very often. It's interesting, too, to think about what this might mean overseas. Piracy is even more common there. Finally, the nice thing about renting is that it would be possible to prevent people from reverse-engineering or making compatible products, because there's a moving target. One could always break compatibility with anything at any time. I've heard no end of horror stories about people upgrading X and then Y not working due to incompatible DLLs. If these could be updated on the fly, at any time, then people would stop trying to write compatible software. thad
Also note that there are several school boards in California, most notably one in sububan San Diego, that has become dominated by religious right wing nuts. They have been voting to deny all federal funds for local education, apparently trying to destroy the public schools in favor of private (read parochial) schools. It's really quite amazing. School board elections might be followed a little more closely in the future.
Check out this C|Net article for more information
It describes how SGI is laying off and transferring a bunch of the Advanced System Division engineers. ASD is the heart and soul of SGI, and has been for a decade. It will be interesting to see what they say next Tuesday, but their actions are pretty revealing. Many engineers are being transfered to NVidia...recall that SGI reached some sort of deal with NVidia in the last couple of weeks about intellectual property.
The article says that the changes are designed to help their more profitable Intel workstations instead of their older Mips-based machines. Now, this of course flies in the face of reality, that the Intel machines lost a ton of money, but the Mips machines made enough that the entire company turned a profit. Of course, reality is a crutch for those who are not cut out to be Marketing Managers.
The article also confirms that the Fahrenheit initiative is being cut back. This is tremendously good news. Fahrenheit was supposed to be a follow-on to OpenGL, Inventor, and Performer -- it is a joint venture with Microsoft. I cannot imagine any input that Microsoft could have on OpenGL to make it better; even without the wretched example of Direct3D. If Fahrenheit was just a bone thrown to Microsoft to distract them from attacking OpenGL -- as it appears to me -- then I give SGI a lot of credit.
In articles a month or so ago, the announcement of the reorganization was going to happen today, the 5th, instead of the 10th. Their stockholder meeting, which used to be in August when I worked there, is now Oct. 27th.
Read the above article mentioned C|Net article, it's chock full of good information.
I work with SGIs too at my visual effects company, we have 10 SGIs and two Linux boxes, an Intel and an Alpha.
SGIs have been the best machines to get the job done for at least the last 12 years, they were fast, easy to program, reasonably well engineered boxes that came from a company committed to graphics.
Still, I expect to be running on Linux very soon on all of our machines. I'm sure that the previous author will acknowledge that machines don't live very long in the FX business, any more than they do anywhere else. The particular boxes that I have will become uncompetitive in a year or so, and we'll need to buy something else.
Those will certainly be Linux boxes. If they could be SGI Linux boxes, that'd be great. But to assume that you will be running IRIX in the future is optimistic, if not foolhardy. Diversifying into another (somewhat more common) operating system is prudent.
The biggest reason that people aren't going to want to move away from IRIX is, of course, the proprietary animation software that they have for those old boxes. One would hope that these tools will be ported to Linux in the not-to-distant future; I'm sure that we'll hear more about that at Siggraph next week. All of the big software companies that I've talked to at least claim to be porting.
I've found that porting an SGI OpenGL application to Linux to be almost trivial. Sadly, I've written a bunch of IRIS GL programs, too, and they are much more of a challenge. But, I should be done soon, and we'll be ready for whatever happens.
[I'm giving away Linux version of some of our most popular programs, at least for the next year. Check them out at http://www.hammerhead.com/linux/linux.html ]
Piracy cannot be stopped by goon squads, even in this country; piracy is too easy, and the number of pirates can easily number in the millions. You cannot use force to stop it.
I heard a story on NPR a while back, saying that 10% of the jobs in this country are protected only by copyright, and it makes sense. Certainly my company, Hammerhead Productions, is dependent on people paying money to go see movies.
The movie business is in for a terrible fall, though, if they don't work very hard to make people want to respect the copyright. I see no effort whatsoever being expended in that area. The financial articles about movies today, if anything, would encourage piracy -- as they tend to describe the fabulous fortunes being made by the top actors, producers, and directors. Nothing will make one want to pirate more than feeling that one's hard-earned money is going to fatten some undeserving persons wallet. Studios are going to have to find ways to demonstrate the
contributions made by the huge majority of the people who work on films, other than just racing their credits by at the end of a film. The carpenters in the world might identify with the grips, the advertising writers with the script supervisors... There has to be an identification with the people involved.
If the film industry is as clueless as they appear, though, we'll end up unable to finance films with budgets of millions of dollars any longer. Perhaps we'll end up with a film industry like the current porno [video only] industry.
To take another lesson from the Chinese, we live in interesting times.
thad
Karin Spaink, a net activist in the Netherlands,
was recently found to have infringed copyright
by providing a link to a admitted copyright
infringing page. Now, this is a little different
in several ways, but a relatively clueful court
did find that a link could be infringing in and
of itself.
thad
I agree that control of content is the most important overlooked aspect of this debate. Several posters have commented on the other issues, and to me, it's a tossup.
Except for the control of content.
There was an article in the paper a year or so ago, that noted that @Home was silently terminating streaming video after 10 minutes. For all I know, that's in their Terms of Service. The reason that they did that, obviously, was that streaming video competed with the cable companies main business, which is to say, TV.
It's easy to imagine several other similar restrictions that could be unilaterally imposed after the fact. For example, the cable-modem monopoly could sell your clickstreams to advertisers. "Hey, we have to do this to provide great service at low cost!" They might put content restrictions on the service; from pornography to competing ideological viewpoints.
Now, of course you are saying "No they couldn't!" But why? They have a monopoly. They have no regulation. And they'd make more money. That means that it will happen. I believe that you either have to open access to cable (stealing, or buying, the cable companies admitted investment) or you'll have very pervasive regulation of what the cable modem companies are allowed to do as ISPs. Personally, I find the former choice less distasteful.
thad
Fahrenheit has never made sense to me.
:)
I worked with Paul Strauss, Rikk Carey, et al, on Iris Inventor
back in '92 and '93, and enjoyed the work, the people, the
environment, and the project -- although now I consider the
idea of a toolkit at the level Inventor was designed to fill an
impossible goal, once a toolkit is powerful enough to fulfiill the
requirements of Inventor, it circumscribes the problems that it
can solve.
Anyway, I talked to Paul Strauss at last year's Siggraph in
Orlando, and he told me not to worry, that Fahrenheit
wouldn't replace OpenGL (which I believe is amazingly
good); and that the Microsoft people were behaving
appropriately, that is, they had reasonable respect for SGI's
experience in 3D graphics libraries.
Still, it's been a year, and I have seen no progress whatsoever
toward these new libraries. Perhaps there is internal
'Developer's Program' documentation to which I am not
privy.
I note with some amusement that the only question posed
and not answered at
http://www.sgi.com/software/performer/faq.html
is "How does IRIS Performer relate to the Fahrenheit
Project?" Every other question in the table of contents
is answered below.
I'm sure that I'll find out what the current status of
Fahrenheit is at Siggraph in LA next month, I hope that
my prayers are answered and Fahrenheit was just a bone
tossed to Microsoft, that will be buried in the backyard
and never seen again
They don't talk about it too much, but I believe that SGI is funding PI in their DRI effort. Also, SGI open-sourced GLX (their layer between GL and X) back in February, as part of the effort to help Precision Insight (and everybody else) write good Linux OpenGL interfaces.
So, I suspect that SGI is working with PI closely and will use the DRI.
thad
The most shocking thing to me is the how Dave talks about how wonderful open source is, and how great Linux is because of that; but on the other hand completely accepts the insane secrecy at Transmeta. Now, I suppose I'd give my eyeteeth to work there too, but it's an odd juxtaposition that is made odder in that he doesn't seem to notice it himself.
The description of programming for windows is great. I'd had exactly that experience; it's upsetting that OpenGL programs run so much faster under windows than Linux. Still, for the FX work that we do, it's much more important to have real operating system support than fast graphics.
And finally, I agree that the integration of X window system support for games is extremely important; not for the success of the games as for the success of the X window system. If we make X work for games, it will work for anything -- and there will be cards and other hardware that will almost magically appear due to the awesome economic power of the gamers.
thad