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May 1, 2011

By Ante

In January 2011, prominent European academics issued an âoeOpinion of European Academics on Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreementâ (ACTA). The academics invite the European institutions, in particular the European Parliament, and the national legislators and governments to withhold consent of ACTA, âoeâ¦as long as significant deviations from the EU acquis or serious concerns on fundamental rights, data protection, and a fair balance of interests are not properly addressedâ.

In April 2011, the European Commissionâ(TM)s services put on-line comments to the European Academicsâ(TM) Opinion on ACTA. The Commission denies ACTA is incompatible with EU law.

The Commission fails to make its point in a convincing way. The Commission shows a lack of basic reading skills, does not address points raised by the academics and fails to reason in a logical way. Regarding the border measures, the Commission actually agrees with the academics. The Parliament should ask the European Court of Justice an opinion on ACTA.

It is too much work to address all the flaws in the Commissionâ(TM)s notes. I will give some examples.

ACTAâ(TM)s damages are higher than EU lawâ(TM)s damages

The academics wrote: âoeSome of the factors mentioned at the end of the provision are not provided for in art. 13.1 Directive 2004/48. These factors should not be adopted in European law since they are not appropriate to measure the damage. âoeThe value of the infringed good or service, measured by the market price, [or] the suggested retail priceâ, as indicated in art. 9.1 ACTA, does not reflect the economic loss suffered by the right holder.â

The Commission states: âoeThere is no conflict between article 9 of ACTA and article 13 of Directive 2004/48/EC. Both provisions refer to ways in which courts can come to the determination of fair damages for the injured party.â

Damages in EU law are based on economic loss suffered by the right holder. The academics show that ACTA goes beyond that. The Commission just calls them both âoefairâ, and sees no difference. This is like saying: âoebig cars and small cars are both nice cars, so there is no difference.â But with cars and with damages, it is not only important both are cars or damages, the size is relevant as well. ACTA exceeds the level of damages in EU law. The Commission does not address the size aspect raised by the academics.

Bringing different things under the same category does not make them the same. Fines and death penalty are both deterrent, they are not the same.

Going beyond economic loss suffered by the right holder is not âoefairâ. It disproportionally hurts for instance startup companies in conflict with major patent holders. The Commission and ACTA advocate seeing damages based on retail price as âoefairâ. Unbalanced enforcement measures may heighten market entrance risks for innovators. Startup companies are often confronted with patent minefields. Even a mere allegation of infringement may easily lead to market exclusion. Startup companies often do not have enough resources to litigate. ACTA is biased against startup companies, the heightened damages hurt innovation.

The Commission states: âoeThe examples given in article 9.1 of ACTA and highlighted by the authors of the Opinion are not mandatory for the ACTA Parties (cf. the provision says âoemay includeâ).â

But this âoemayâ in article 9.1, is permissive towards the rights holders, it refers to âoeany legitimate measure of value the right holder submitsâ. Article 9.1 is not permissive towards the ACTA parti

I didn't see it mentioned, so I'd like to make you aware of Vincenty's algorithm to calculate the geodesic distance of two geo-referenced points. It also takes the ellipsoid shape of the earth into account. It's from 1975, very compact and converges blazingly fast. I can't say if it is used in current geo-information systems, but you'd need to be better than Vincenty to improve upon the state of the art.

As to suitable conferences: Have a look at the publication list of an existing geo-information research institute and try the conferences where they publish.

Or try the free (as in beer) Voodoo Camera Tracker
Lets you export pointclouds (not 3d models, as in the story) to a variety of formats, including Blender.

A way to backup is nicely illustrated by http://antrix.net/journal/techtalk/seagate_freeagent.htmlDeepak though theres no mention about cost.

Or use gpart, which will fix your partitions on Linux. Still a good idea to backup, but that will solve at least some of your trouble.

http://www.unikik.uni-hannover.de/images/spiral36. jpg

The detector is in Germany, visible on Google Maps photos. The beam arms are WNW of the arrow, along a trapezoid-shaped field with a power line tower (look for the shadow) in it. The beam arms form a 93 degree angle and resemble a road at the default zoom. The GEO 600 visitors page has a different photo.

It is IMHO a bad idea to learn C directly before C++. Good style C programs are usually bad style C++ programs, so you'll have to "unlearn" a lot of habits from C. OTOH, when learning C++ first, then it will be easier to go to C, because the compiler will usually complain if you use C++-typical idioms.

If you insist on learning C first, it's probably a good idea to learn Java before C++, because that way I think it's easier to get into OO habits.

It may even be a good idea to have some LISP experience before going to C++, because some advanced template techniques are basically functional style (I guess that's why many people shy away from those).

BTW, I guess you meant Perl, not Pearl.

Documentation like this is great and extremely valuable. It would be much more valuable, however, if it remained current. For example, can the ABISS project (which improves block I/O) be used at all? What do the numbers look like, when using profiling tools like Web100 (which profiles TCP communications)?

Has anyone run the Linux or one of the *BSD kernels through DAKOTA, KOJAK or PAPI to determine where, precisely, bottlenecks are within the kernels? It's easy to theorise, but isn't it cleaner to measure?

Now, I'm not saying these things aren't being done. They probably are, somewhere, by someone, but if the results aren't getting published we don't really know what impact what changes are going to have. The current method of evolving Operating System code in general is often a mix of personal theory and subjective experience based on non-random samples of activity. That can't really be a good way to do things, can it?

If I'm wrong, feel free to say. If I'm right, then maybe it would be a good thing if someone (possibly me) put together some kind of testing kit for measuring Linux kernel performance and actually measured the stats for Linux kernels on some kind of regular basis.

I think of them as the wake of stuff (albeit big singularity-type stuff) dancing in space. To us a long distance away (many times the separation of the objects), the disruptions caused by the two things moving around should be something we can sense.

Of course there's a medium through which all things in the Cosmos move -- we have to label it and measure it; the rubber sheet metaphor is helpful for us to understand it. General relativity allows for all manner of funny space-time conditions but to do so uses maths from topology to communicate this. The key part of this maths is the Metric of the topological thingummy over which our Cosmic Bodies are dancing, which is an unavoidable indication of an invisible, insensitive substance behind our cosmology. Unfortunately, this is only the maths of the model of the cosmology, so it may not necessarily really be there (and I apologise for messing with your head).

The reason this is relevant to the news of LIGO/VIRGO/GEO/TAMA news: Michelson & Morley developed the interferometer which is the key part of all these GW observatories in order to show that the 'Ether' really existed, and had nothing positive to show after years of testing the thing. This isn't more expensive repetition of the same experiments because these devices seek something other than Michelson sought, and they are being used differently.

Both sites are asking for public help processing the data, via a special screensaver called Einstein@Home.

--Greg

I am learning or want to learn:
C++
Java
Python
Pearl
Javascript

I know:
HTML

Please do not ask me to make any programs.

did he really mean Pearl there? looks like that should be Perl. what is Pearl

someone at the university of hannover made a simmilar thing
http://www.itp.uni-hannover.de/~dragon/stonehenge/ stone1.htm
in german though..

It has been done (pdf) with images from Space Imaging's sats, so I'm still a bit in the dark as to what 2 cameras buys the Indians (there must be something, eh?).

1. Good coregistration was too difficult with the available information. I've written coregistration code before, for the CAHV linearized images, however there are serious problems when using the CAHVOR or CAHVORE model images (Navcam is CAHVOR). This is because not only is the distortion in the model nonlinear, but it depends on the distance of the point from the camera - something that we can only approximate using a planar surface model. My suggestion for coregistration, given the current information, would be to do feature matching to generate a set of "equivilent" points in each image plane, and create a function which, given a relative position and orientation, would generate rays from each matching point. A nonlinear optimization algorithm (perhaps simplex method solver) would then iterate until it found a relative position/orientation that minimized the mean square distance between "equivilent" rays. I believe this is similar to how much motion tracking software works. This is, however, quite difficult to do without a preprogrammed software package designed to do this. After this the second image would still have to be projected on to the planar model of Mars, which is also nontrivial.
2. From a purely scientific point of view, "proper" coregistration is almost entirely unnecessary. Because of the fact that the phenomenon is so far away, the far field effect takes care of almost all of the error. There is a two dimensional coregistration method that could be used for this purpose (Alex Hayes, Cornell '03, described it in his honors thesis) using multiple fourier transforms, one in linear space (for shifts), and one in radial/logarithmic space (for rotations and scaling).

Mp3 gets down to 32kbit/s, even 8kbit/s if you change the sampling rate. Ogg gets down to ~0.7kbit/s but that still is 9706 bytes for 1'3" silence. Ironically I can do better using an uncopressed wav file, mono, 8bit, 1Hz, ~0.014kbit/s, 107 byte. Although I must admit I have some problems playing this file without telling the player to resample it, it clearly is 1'3" of pure silence.

http://www.unix-ag.uni-hannover.de/~ingo/silence.w av if you want to hear for yourself.

Disclaimer: This is not the silence mentioned above but an exception of my own /dev/null.

* If anyone wants to mail me a copy of the newest knoppix cd I'll update it. I hate downloading ISO images. My address is 888 E 18th Ave, Apt 8. Eugene, OR 97401.

It is included with knoppix, last I checked.

Even with VC-9 as a feature of the standard for HD-DVD there is no reason to assume it (VC-9) will actually gain market acceptance. For example "MPEG-2 Multichannel" aka (MPEG-2 BC) was specified in the v1.0 DVD specification only to never actually show up in DVD disc software or playback hardware having failed to gain market acceptance even after gaining acceptance into the standard.

For a while I worked as a research programmer for one of the General Relative Groups working on the GEO600 Gravitational Wave Detector in both the UK and Germany. GEO600 is a UK and Germany co-project.

The interferometer is a typical Michaelson interferemoter using lasers with two orthogonal branches 600 metres in length. These gravitation events are small. Movements are ~10-E24 metres. It is expected that only one or two events a year will be detected. So it must run 24/7, 365 days a year.

Naturally you have to remove as much of the noise from the data as possible to detect an event. Mirrors are hung on glass threads as they are thermally inert. It runs in a vacuum. It is temperature controlled. Everything is monitored from air pressure to sisemology. The amount of data being produced is incredible. I assume LIGO is the same hence the distributed analysis.

GE0600 uses a microwave link to transmit data from the site to Hanover where it is backed up and fat pipes pass it on to partner universities. The 'head end' on site uses triple redundancy and enough bufferage for 24 hours back-up on site.

You are talking many gigabytes a day and many terabytes a year and some where in this lot will be an event. This is truely the domain of super computing or distributed processing.

Of course, even LIGO which is larger, is unlikely to spot many events if any and we will probably have to wait until LISA, the NASA/JPL/ESA spaced based interferometry project is up and running to get decent results.

As written up at the back of Wired mag a few years back.

http://www.geo600.uni-hannover.de/

Picture two tubes, each exactly 600m long and at 90 degrees to one another in the horizontal plane. Bounce a laser beam off a mirror at the end of each one. The time should be identical. Unless there is a gravitational pulse, in which case one would appear shorter than the other.

Or maybe this is something completely different =)

Yeah, okay, you could buy the $2K program, or you could use the accurate, fast, open-source utility gpart that has been around for YEARS. It has saved my ass more than once.

It may not be necessary to completely format and wipe clean the HD if you lose the partition table. To repair/write a partition table to disk, normally you might use fdisk and have to hand enter the sectors/blocks boundaries of the partitions.There is a open source tool called gpart. gpart will guess the partitions on the HD and can also write a new partition table to HD. I have had an instance where electrical outages & fluctuations caused the HD to lose its partition table. The table was inacurately identified the HD as one FAT16 patition when there was really a linux partition and a swap partition. gpart was able to clear this up and I did not lose and data. Go to http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/ to get the source or a binary for linux and freebsd. I think gpart is available on knoppix and perhaps also Gentoo LiveCDs.

The "new" SpaceTraveler knob reminds me of the "dials and buttons" that SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc) used to sell with their workstations years ago:
http://www.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/Grafik/sgi/onyx/di als-and-buttons.jpg

Basiclly two panels... one covered with programmable buttons, the other with programable knobs. These, plus a SpaceBall, and you really didn't need to spent much time using the keyboard. I see that Magellan/Logitech still sells Spaceballs--they're sure neat, especially when using an app that supports two-handed modeling... one hand "holds" and moves the 3D model (usually in wireframe mode) with the 3D spaceball, while the other hand uses the mouse to work on the wireframe itself.

I don't know if your setup requires having new VOIP phones or not, but when I got my new VOIP phone, I needed to also get a new corded headset since my old one doesn't work with the Cisco phone.

There are two types of headset pinouts: headset and handset. Sounds like you had a handset pinout. You can easily chop the end off, repin it out and recrimp it.

Here's a URL to help:
http://www.rvs.uni-hannover.de/people/einhorn/head set/index_e.html

No need for an amplifier since the Cisco 7960/7940 will do that for you.

Good luck.

There is a whole field of science which deals with the statistics of subjective measurement. Here's a reference to a book which you might pick up to inform yourself:

Sensory Evaluation Techniques

Subjective tests of codecs are not new or particularly controversial. See the MPEG group's own subjective test of AAC:

Report On The MPEG-2 AAC Stereo Verification Tests (PDF File)

The statistics in the hydrogenaudio test treats each listener as a "block," which takes into account the fact that different listeners will have different ideas about what constitutes a "4" or a "2," etc.

The next test will use an anchor (Blade mp3 at 128 kbit/s) to keep the ratings in perspective.

ff123

This experiment is really designed to test which codec overall sounds better to the average user, for an arbitrary and inconsistent range of hardware setups, acoustic environments, and listening preferences (e.g. do I pay more attention to the primary beat or to the background harmony). I wouldn't place any value on this test other than to choose which codec I might choose if I wanted to please the ignorant consumer (a valid market, of course!). It does nothing to address how accurately a codec reproduces the artist's original sound.

I'll put a lot more stock in the Report on the MPEG-2 AAC Stereo Verification Tests put together by David Meares (BBC), Kaoru Watanabe (NHK), Eric Scheirer (MIT Media Labs) for the ISO. And the other MPEG Audio Public Documents.

This experiment is really designed to test which codec overall sounds better to the average user, for an arbitrary and inconsistent range of hardware setups, acoustic environments, and listening preferences (e.g. do I pay more attention to the primary beat or to the background harmony). I wouldn't place any value on this test other than to choose which codec I might choose if I wanted to please the ignorant consumer (a valid market, of course!). It does nothing to address how accurately a codec reproduces the artist's original sound.

I'll put a lot more stock in the Report on the MPEG-2 AAC Stereo Verification Tests put together by David Meares (BBC), Kaoru Watanabe (NHK), Eric Scheirer (MIT Media Labs) for the ISO. And the other MPEG Audio Public Documents.

before the euro with its flashy pseudoarchitecture, germany even had gauss on the 10-mark note.
why do the americans always do presidents? i maybe can understand this in a representative monarchy like the uk, but...

Here's the official MPEG-2 AAC quality report: http://www.tnt.uni-hannover.de/project/mpeg/audio/ public/w2006.html. MPEG-4 AAC is based on MPEG-2 AAC (but admitedly different) with what is claimed to be a 30% improvement.

Also, the survey you link to makes this note: "The perceived differences at 128 kbps were already very small." In other words, at 128kbps, the ranking they give could be statistically insignificant. We don't see any numbers, and it's noted at the end of the article that the c't report is not available online. We also don't see any specifics as to where the quality deviated. Or as to the test setup, the audio samples (self-selected? please), etc.

I am also very skeptical of this ranking, which places 128kbps MP3 above 128kbps AAC and at the same time says that the difference was very small. Maybe this works since the listeners did not actually listen for deviations from the original, just their overall impression. I also think I remember reading that WMA "improved" perceived quality by adjusting the volume, because typical listeners associate that with a better sound. That does not mean it encoded with high fidelity.

Now, ranking based on overall impression is fine, since that's what you want to optimize for anyway. But fidelity is also very important.

Definately take GPart. I've used it in the past to fix corrupted partition tables. Combine this with Tomsrtbt (floppy disk linux).

It does not standardize the encoder, but rather standardizes the type of information that an encoder has to produce and write to an MPEG-1 conformant bitstream as well as the way in which the decoder has to parse, decompress, and resynthesize this information in order to regain the encoded sound.

All of them I approve, but what's up with Japan? Japan gets some 1,200 minor earthquakes per DAY. how in the world do they expect to overcome the seismic noise floor (pun somewhat intended)?

Armagetron, TRON, java, better java, MetaTRON, BMTron (java), and of course this

the free software community doesn't have an equivalent to

Microsoft Access (gui + form builder, not just Jet)

Replace the Jet backend with MySQL, and replace the form builder with any tool for building HTML forms. Stick some PHP glue in the middle, throw it all on an Apache server, and you're set.

ESRI ArcGIS (Grass doesn't count)

In a killer app discussion, it's wise to state why the Grass package does not perform GIS to your standards.

WinZip

Last time I used GNOME (about 1.2 or so), it had functionality equivalent to Microsoft Windows ME and Windows XP operating systems' Compressed Folders feature.

Note that close to c, things would not simply look contracted paralled to the relative movement but rotated (which results in contraction of the projected length). It's hard to explain with words only, you can get a far better feeling for it by looking at the relativistic ray tracing simulations of a Flight Through Stonehenge.
This does not take into account all SR effects (e.g. the Doppler shift) and it does not take into account GR effects (it's also a straight movement, not circular) - but it still might help you to get a feeling for relativistic effects.

An overview of simulations of special relativistic flights can be found Andrew Hamiltons Homepage.

Juggle is a photomosaic program a friend wrote (in Java, GPL'd, used in LIMP, check it out)

He has a doc on his website which explains some of the problems and gives the algorithms (with refs) which he used to work out which colours were closest for the purposes of matching sub-tiles to parts of the target image. You want the algorithms.pdf link.

(Sorry about the tagging, I couldn't work out how to lose the hannover bit in the comment)

This codec was developed by a German student in his spare time. He was dissatisfied with the quality of MP3, so made his own better codec.

Look at the MPEGplus home page for more information.

It achieves better compression than MP3 with better sounding results.

Also check out these webpages where other people have gone through a lot of trouble to compare audio codecs: Eric Mrozek's Audio Compression Page
Radified Guide to non-MP3 Encoders for CD Audio

Yes there are tools to thoroughly delete files on your computer, rather than just unlinking them when they're put in the trash, but it's the distributed nature of content these days that poses a special problem to the Ollie North's of the world.

Well, I don't think any OS has ever been short of undeletion tools - in unix, one can grep the inodes on a disk for a particular known string of a file and recover it fron a known template. Tools like gpart (a partition guesser) also easily recover those vital 512 bytes of your hard disk.

Where Unix has been lacking, behind most other systems, is the opposite - a good, reliable, trashcan. It might be interesting to note that there's now a reliable trashcan for Linux, BSD and other glibc systems th simply preloads and wraps unlink, `move and a couple of other system calls.

Since glibc is a part of the Linux Standard base, it works along with every LSB standard app. Even better, it doesn't matter whether you delete the file from KDE, GNOME, shittyunixtoolkitforhellcirca1980something or a terminal.

Anyway, check out Libtrash. And if you're a GNOME or KDE hacker, I'll give you a big hug if you use this as the default trashcan or your next release. :D

Or, for those who like a slightly prettier interface, there's gtklp.

Of course, with a drive that size, you could go all-out and use Monkey's Audio, lossless audio compression (you can decode to get *exactly* the same WAV file that was encoded. Compression ratio of only 2:1 or so, but again...what's the 100 GB drive for?!! Get on Google and search around for some comparisons, and make an educated choice.

I'm been stealing them from here, and have tried a few graphics programs as well, but none have yet proved to be good enough.

You'd be amazed at what this tool can recover.

Linux rocks!!! www.dedserius.com

GRASS has been freely available (GPL'd) for many years and has been continuously upgraded. Grass is Unix based, runs in Linux as well as others including windows. It provides both raster as well as vector capabilities. So why write a new one? For more on GRASS check out one of the mirror sites: US
Germany
Japan
(There are other mirrors as well). Billy The Mountain

Quite easy actually. I've been doing a lot of ncurses programming lately. You can do some amazinly elaborate things with it if your a good programmer. A good technique really pays. If you start running into situations where you're brute-forcing it, I advise that you back off and do a little work on a good "framework" for your app(that's one minus about ncurses, there's very little "flamework").

Some key points about ncurses:

o It's very fast - Text mode applications are great for productivity. Their GUI counterparts always turn out to be slower for some reason.
o Menus and Forms - The menu and form libraries are standard on UNIXes. You can fairly easily create fields for data entry that have built in validation routines ...etc.
o Tables - Well, not exactly, but a clever way to make a very snappy table is to just use a menu. In text mode you can't tell the differnce. Ncurses menu-tables are more than what the Java 1.1 AWT library provides
o Well established - Curses programming has been around for a long time. The characteristics of many terminal types has been worked out(by ESR) and abstracted into the terminfo database. Its quite portable.
o Works Anywhere - You can run it over telnet, ssh, or just dump bulky X alltogether and run on the Linux console.

Here's some links:

Ncurses Intro by Eric S. Raymond and Zeyd M. Ben-Halim
Linux Journal Artical by ESR
Fujitsu ETI Programmers Guide
SCO ETI Programming

I really wish people would concentrate more ncurses programs. They're just damn efficient. Anyone who uses mutt and slrn and such knows what I'm talking about. If you're really clever, you'll librarify whatever it is that your working on so you can hook on a GUI version later after you've tweeked the behavior of the app without wasting a lot of clock-cycles on graphics programming.

>Really, I wish the GRASS project were moving faster (or moving at all).

>So if you want to open one of those, now standard file types, better be prepared to pony up some real cash.

>Really, I wish the GRASS project were moving faster (or moving at all).

>So if you want to open one of those, now standard file types, better be prepared to pony up some real cash.

>Really, I wish the GRASS project were moving faster (or moving at all).

>So if you want to open one of those, now standard file types, better be prepared to pony up some real cash.

I've spent the last year developing a high volume web-based map server using Open Source tools. Note that the emphasis of this project has been vector based data (streets, rivers, shorelines, etc.), not image or raster data, so this skews my views somewhat. Sorry for the length of this post, but this really only scratches the surface of this topic.

The two best free tools I found for manipulating map data and producing maps are GRASS (www.geog.uni-hannover.de/grass/) and OpenMap (openmap.bbn.com). GRASS certainly wins hands-down for its ability to read various file formats (including ESRI Shape Files and E00 Files), but its interface is somewhat ... odd ... and I've found it very buggy when dealing with vector products. OpenMap is a very nice Java application and library that can do some very slick graphics and handle many different projections. However, because it is written in Java, it's ability to scale to the level that I needed (random access street level maps being produced in several seconds) is practically non-existant. Nevertheless, if you are looking for a "higher level" of mapping tool, OpenMap is probably the tool you are looking for.

I've also looked (somewhat superficially) at the major commercial mapping programs, produced by ESRI (www.ersi.com) and MapInfo (www.mapinfo.com). At prices starting at around $25000 and rapidly going up, you'll certainly need a lot of money to get into this game.

On the data side, there's a lot of data available on the net, some of it very good, and some not so good. Finding it is tricky, but it can be done. The "Digital Chart of the World" (DCW) is available from (HREF) and provides vector outlines for all the countries in the world (circa the early '90s). Its North American utility is somewhat limited, as the lat/lon points used in the vector outlines are based on NAD27, rather than the more popular NAD83 datum. The TIGER Line Files (HREF) is an excellent source of street level data (and state and county outlines, and much more) for the United States and various territories. Once the format of this data is understood, it's fairly easy to convert the data to a more usable format. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be much in the way of the tools out there on the net for working with this data.

There's very little free street level data available outside the United States. This is an area crying out for an Open database, as the non-free data sources are really expensive and generally involve nasty royalities.

I have been working on a the Onamap.com project for the last year. The primary purpose of Onamap is to provide a "where is it" tool for the Internet in which anyone can enter location data, commentary, etc.. The components of this project are:
- a common text-based file format for vector data;
- tools for converting TIGER, ESRI Shape Files, and DCW to this common format;
- the location web server, written using Apache, mod_python, and MySQL; and
- a high volume map server, written using Apache, jserv, Java, and C++.

The map server is fairly new technology, and the components written in Java (mainly the rendering engine utilizing Java2D) need to be rewritten in something more efficient. If you want to see samples of the maps that this engine can produce, go to http://www.onamap.com/sample.

The plan is to release this software to the public (down to the source level) in the next few months, after the code is cleaned up, debugged and documented. If anyone is interested in this project, please feel free to mail me at dpjanes@sympatico.ca.

Pearl is a language.