Given the lack of ent shots in the preview, there's probably a large room of frantically busy animators in New Zeland Maya'ing like crazy. What could be a more difficult CG challenge? Ents are all character. They don't have flashy teeth, wings, or much in the way of joints, and they are the most endearing characters in the six books. I bet there's a huge pile of ent bits in/dev/null, and not many left for the previews.
I've seen dozens of projects fail. Only projects with engineers acting as project managers have succeeded. The concept of "management specialists" is fatally flawed, and actually quite insane if you think about it for awhile. Managers have to be able to make decisions based on personal experience and domain knowledge. Traditionally, engineering project managers were very senior managers with advanced degrees. Project management was a field that you would work your way up to after several years as a junior engineer, then senior engineer, then team leader. This is another fad notion being followed with no substantiation or logic, probably as a result of the deficit of qualified project managers during the dotcom boom. It turns out that the projects probably were not all that important, however, so, in the long run (like everything else) I suppose it doesn't really matter.
But don't think you're going to get it to work.
If your org is typical, you may actually be being saddled with this "project management" in order to collect productivity metrics. In this notion engineering development is treated as a Production process rather than as a Design process. Engineering, of course, is a Design process, so to manage it you have to look at how engineering design has traditionally been managed -- what has succeeded and what has failed. Production processes are good for managing things like building a tract of houses.
When I was a kid I spent several years working as a building contractor and a project manager of building construction. For the last 20 years I have been an engineer and recently a manager of software development. They are not at all the same thing and the models should not be confused.
> After all, what was rock and roll before the > electric guitar?
They say it was the delta blues, especially that from Robert Johnson and his buddies. The music did not actually change that much; it became a lot easier to perform it in large live venues. What was truly created by technology is the Rock Concert.
Software engineering is a subset of sytems engineering. I think that one of the problems with software engineering culture is that there is not a neutral approach to modeling in general. Almost all the noise is about specific types of modeling, presented with an almost religious fervor, especially object. Most people use the term "object" without much understanding; I've had several senior chief engineers tell me there is only object or procedural.
If you want to address modeling in general you should probably lift up a domain and look into systems engineering and cybernetics. General graph theory is the place to start; basically you can "conceptually" model any way you can graph. From graph theory you can go one way into the "Structured Modeling" discipline, and the other way into standard SW treatments: structured analysis, dataflow, CRC, UML, to see how models are used. But the real question is, how are models mis-used? That is, has does a prejudice for a specific modeling method hamper the design?
The most important thing for an engineer is practicality. One has to blow through all of the convention and marketing to arrive at a solution with the greatest overall payback, on schedule and on budget. The only way a teacher can help develop this is by building an appreciation for essential principles over fads and heavily marketed conventions. Fads and marketing, however, are what has built careers in SW methodology. There has been no incentive to be a loud generalist, so you will not find any general materials yet.
I think you're going to have to put it together yourself...
People just seem to get excited about simple things these days. XML is a little more structured than a text file, which is often used for representing graphs. A representation doesn't have to *be* or *act as* something in order to represent the thing. A graph can be represented as a set of elements (A, B, C, D) and a set of edges (AD, DC, CA, CB) -- XML just lets you tag the elements and edges. As usual, you still have to process the representation into a structure suitable for traversal.
I cannot begin without violating a patent.
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
I've been working in the field of Computer Vision for 20 years, primarily as an algorithm designer. I have no patents. At the first company I worked for, my boss got a patent on digital template matching. We (all the engineers) thought it was the most absurd thing we ever heard of, that such an obvious thing could be patented (~1984.)
Since then I have solved hundreds of problems using advanced and novel coding techniques, extremely weird data structures, at the lowest levels of software (down into microcode.) This work was funded both by the government and private industry. No patents were sought. The value was always claimed at the system level. Most of the source is copyrighted, however.
The problem is not that it is *easy* to copy the software inventions that are being patented, once you have seen the invention. The real problem is that it is impossible not to *accidently* copy the invention when you have a similar problem to solve. Problems beg certain solutions, and the soution is constrained by the tools and the media. Compared to the properties of materials in general, which is the domain of physical patents, software is extremely constrained by the organization of the digital computer. Any good computer scientist, faced with a similar problem, will code a similar solution.
With the current trend of patent grants, I truly do not think that I can code anything of significance without violating a patent somewhere. But how would I ever know?
For instance, take a look at a toy program I wrote that correlates font bitmaps against an image in order to create a text image:
http://www.noping.net/kent/txtimg/
In order to get the correlation to work the font bitmap has to be blurred a little bit. I'm certain that this is a patentable invention under current patent policy. It may already be patented! I have no idea. But there is no other solution to the problem -- the problem demanded that solution, and any other coder who tried to solve this particular problem would necessarily arrive at the same solution. The problem plus the context plus the media demand the solution.
I appended the parent to a letter addressed to the editorial staff of Recording Magazine and Electronic Musician Magazine:
Are you folks following the legislation and debates regarding the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA)? It (slowly) appears that the only practical, rational motivation for the act is to curtail the availability of digital recording devices outside of the studio system. A careful reading of the bill will show that it has the power to cripple the recording capabilities of all digital devices. Some of us computer geeks are beginning to think that CBDTPA is a last ditch effort by the established production houses to avert the threat created by the dual availability of professional quality authoring equipment (digital recording) and open distribution channels (the internet.)
An archival source of CBDTA related material is:
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/cbdtpa/
The above site has the text of the bill online. The clincher is Section 5:
"SEC. 5. PROHIBITION ON SHIPMENT IN INTERSTATE COMMERCE OF NONCONFORMING DIGITAL MEDIA DEVICES. (a) IN GENERAL. -- A manufacturer, importer, or seller of digital media devices may not -- (1) sell, or offer for sale, in interstate commerce, or (2) cause to be transported in, or in a manner affecting, interstate commerce, a digital medial device unless the device includes and utilizes standard security technologies that adhere to the security system standards adopted under section 3."
slashdot.org is a good place to keep abreast of the issues, though as yet only a small percentage of the members seem to be aware of the depth of the threat from CBDTA. A recent article is:
I can't even get past the first paragraph. He defines the internet as the browser, and the browser as (clearly) IE. If I wanted to "innovate" a network application, I certainly wouldn't stuff it in a browser...
I haven't thought about this enough, but something is seriously wrong with the ground rules. The purpose of patent law is to motivate private industry to develop inventions for the public good. Patent law is created and maintained by we the public for our benefit, by definition. Here there is some notion that an invention can itself become part of the public, which sounds like someone (besides just me) is confused. That is, something that was not someone has become someone by human invention. !.
This is a collision of a several loaded issues in one place. The two most obvious to me are the "right to life vs. right to choose" issue, and the "capitalist vs. socialist" debate. The "capitalist vs. socialist" issue is not so obvious so I will address it first.
Suppose we succeeded in defining "life" and decided that life shall not be patentable. Then private industry would stop working on all life containing products, and the public would loose the benefit of oil eating bacteria and similar products. But these products may be so compelling that the public does not want to loose these benefits. So let the public develop them. Furthermore, let the public nationalize inventions surfaced by private industry that encompass "life." Practically speaking, this would mean an absorption by the government of most biotech talent, wherein all research and results would naturally be in the public domain. This may well be in the best interest of the public. There is a qualitative difference between the benefit of a light bulb or a hyperlink and that of a humouse.
Nationalizing biotech would also defuse the "ownership" issue and let people concentrate on the more pertinent issue of ethics.
Which brings me to the "right to life vs. right to choose" issue. If the public cannot decide on the entity status of a human embryo, how on earth is the patent office going to make decisions regarding the property ownership of modifications of the embryo? But then again, perhaps the current status of the law is that an embryo is not an entity. But apparently it is possible for an industry to invent it into an entity, though hopefully not a human entity? Addressing this in the context of patent law is fascinating and insane.
The sign was not the art; the performance of planning and installing the sign was intentionally art. The installation was self consciously filmed as an artistic "event", a form of conceptual art. By getting members of the Los Angeles art community to agree that the performance was art, it thereby became actual and authentic art. It's all sort of suspicious. I think it's actually marketing or sales...
What do you think you are, some kind of Jedi knight, waving your hand around like that?
Microsoft can choose to provide software components using several different approaches. The notion of requiring an entire program is rather novel, and first surfaced with Internet Explorer. Before that time components were physically deployed as DLLs. The components provided with IE are also DLLs, of course, but they are not packaged for independent deployment.
Consider choosing to depend on a single simple DLL like comdlg32. I link dynamically and include comdlg32 in the installation process. Under XP if that version is already there nothing happens; if it isn't there is side-by-sides. Under earlier Windows if it is already there it gets overwritten. Either way, comdlg32.dll is installed as a shareable library. Now if another program is also installed that uses comdlg32 the same thing happens. But no bloat has occured -- both programs use the same DLL and load one instance when both programs are executing at the same time.
The HTML rendering components of IE could also be packaged for independent deployment, if Microsoft desired. No bloat or configuration problems would occur. But Microsoft intentionally changed their deployment model with the development of IE. The fact that the physical model is so convoluted is not an excuse, it is a symptom of anti-competitive practice.
True, but they don't really appear crooked
either -- they just appear sort of stupid.
Hence the parent comment. But they aren't
really stupid at all, they are actually very
capable WRT American politics. American politics
is not about correctness, or ethics, or intelligence, it is about collecting power.
Politicians make only a token effort at appearing sincere when they deal with constituents.
If one of our politicians were to write an honest description of their insights into capturing power in American politics, I'm certain it would read as well as the response of Dr. Nuñez.
This is a little off topic, but what if this concern and legislation is a symptom of the death of an "industry" that existed as a short term fluke? Legislative bodies should try to take a long term perspective on the matter so that the law books don't end up looking too silly.
Historically the benefit provided by media industries was provided by a "cottage" industry of local and traveling artisans: minstrels, acting troops, vaudville, etc. The expensive technology of recording and reproduction created a few production enterprises in the mid 20th to service the new market for reproduced performance. The means of production were owned by the studios, though the content was being provided by modern versions of the original artisans. The production / marketing centers created a notion of "elite" artisans, however, which certainly has crushed a lot of talent.
Now, however, the means of production are moving back into the hands of the artisans. A talented artist does not need a production company to produce an excellent recorded work. It is only a consequence that the means of production are also a good means of reproduction, which is causing the media companies this first set of problems. The true problem will come when people (known by our government as "consumers") rediscover their appreciation for artistic authenticity over cynically marketed fame. The media companies will be transformed into mass advertising agencies for the talent that captures the greatest net share on it's own.
Wherein copyright law will revert back to the original intent -- to protect the interests of the true creator. And all these strange interim laws and machinations will amuse future historians.
Come to think of it, this is actually a good act, from the perspective of open source developers. Creating technical barriers without creating legal barriers will end up stoking exactly the kind of innovation the RIAA probably does not want. There will be a whole new product category for media resamplers, and you can bet the quality of the D/A/D chain will improve to keep up.
From the act text:
"Only someone who violates the law "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" can be convicted"
It will always be easy for programmers to build systems that resample and re-encode. As long as we don't try to make money off the result we are not even targets for this act.
Any "media" has to be converted into the analog domain in order to be useful. The degradation caused by resampling will not be anywhere near as bad as that of, for instance, converting CD quality digital into MP3 digital. At most this would force people to resample, won't it? As long as there is a programmable device to regenerate the analog, the programmers are still in control. This may force MP3 player mfgrs to have a prohibitive codec, but then we can just use Sony Clie's and similar portable systems to reproduce the media.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the lack of ent shots in the preview, there's probably a large room of frantically busy animators in New Zeland Maya'ing like crazy. What could be a more difficult CG challenge? Ents are all character. They don't have flashy teeth, wings, or much in the way of joints, and they are the most endearing characters in the six books. I bet there's a huge pile of ent bits in /dev/null, and not many left for the previews.
I've seen dozens of projects fail. Only projects with engineers acting as project managers have succeeded. The concept of "management specialists" is fatally flawed, and actually quite insane if you think about it for awhile. Managers have to be able to make decisions based on personal experience and domain knowledge. Traditionally, engineering project managers were very senior managers with advanced degrees. Project management was a field that you would work your way up to after several years as a junior engineer, then senior engineer, then team leader. This is another fad notion being followed with no substantiation or logic, probably as a result of the deficit of qualified project managers during the dotcom boom. It turns out that the projects probably were not all that important, however, so, in the long run (like everything else) I suppose it doesn't really matter.
But don't think you're going to get it to work.
If your org is typical, you may actually be being saddled with this "project management" in order to collect productivity metrics. In this notion engineering development is treated as a Production process rather than as a Design process. Engineering, of course, is a Design process, so to manage it you have to look at how engineering design has traditionally been managed -- what has succeeded and what has failed. Production processes are good for managing things like building a tract of houses.
When I was a kid I spent several years working as a building contractor and a project manager of building construction. For the last 20 years I have been an engineer and recently a manager of software development. They are not at all the same thing and the models should not be confused.
Why bother reading stuff (especially on that little screen)?
> After all, what was rock and roll before the
> electric guitar?
They say it was the delta blues, especially that from Robert Johnson and his buddies. The music did not actually change that much; it became a lot easier to perform it in large live venues. What was truly created by technology is the Rock Concert.
Software engineering is a subset of sytems engineering. I think that one of the problems with software engineering culture is that there is not a neutral approach to modeling in general. Almost all the noise is about specific types of modeling, presented with an almost religious fervor, especially object. Most people use the term "object" without much understanding; I've had several senior chief engineers tell me there is only object or procedural.
If you want to address modeling in general you should probably lift up a domain and look into systems engineering and cybernetics. General graph theory is the place to start; basically you can "conceptually" model any way you can graph. From graph theory you can go one way into the "Structured Modeling" discipline, and the other way into standard SW treatments: structured analysis, dataflow, CRC, UML, to see how models are used. But the real question is, how are models mis-used? That is, has does a prejudice for a specific modeling method hamper the design?
The most important thing for an engineer is practicality. One has to blow through all of the convention and marketing to arrive at a solution with the greatest overall payback, on schedule and on budget. The only way a teacher can help develop this is by building an appreciation for essential principles over fads and heavily marketed conventions. Fads and marketing, however, are what has built careers in SW methodology. There has been no incentive to be a loud generalist, so you will not find any general materials yet.
I think you're going to have to put it together yourself...
People just seem to get excited about simple things these days. XML is a little more structured than a text file, which is often used for representing graphs. A representation doesn't have to *be* or *act as* something in order to represent the thing. A graph can be represented as a set of elements (A, B, C, D) and a set of edges (AD, DC, CA, CB) -- XML just lets you tag the elements and edges. As usual, you still have to process the representation into a structure suitable for traversal.
I've been working in the field of Computer Vision for 20 years, primarily as an algorithm designer. I have no patents. At the first company I worked for, my boss got a patent on digital template matching. We (all the engineers) thought it was the most absurd thing we ever heard of, that such an obvious thing could be patented (~1984.)
Since then I have solved hundreds of problems using advanced and novel coding techniques, extremely weird data structures, at the lowest levels of software (down into microcode.) This work was funded both by the government and private industry. No patents were sought. The value was always claimed at the system level. Most of the source is copyrighted, however.
The problem is not that it is *easy* to copy the software inventions that are being patented, once you have seen the invention. The real problem is that it is impossible not to *accidently* copy the invention when you have a similar problem to solve. Problems beg certain solutions, and the soution is constrained by the tools and the media. Compared to the properties of materials in general, which is the domain of physical patents, software is extremely constrained by the organization of the digital computer. Any good computer scientist, faced with a similar problem, will code a similar solution.
With the current trend of patent grants, I truly do not think that I can code anything of significance without violating a patent somewhere. But how would I ever know?
For instance, take a look at a toy program I wrote that correlates font bitmaps against an image in order to create a text image:
http://www.noping.net/kent/txtimg/
In order to get the correlation to work the font bitmap has to be blurred a little bit. I'm certain that this is a patentable invention under current patent policy. It may already be patented! I have no idea. But there is no other solution to the problem -- the problem demanded that solution, and any other coder who tried to solve this particular problem would necessarily arrive at the same solution. The problem plus the context plus the media demand the solution.
Or could Amazon use the one click patent against
Netscape?
Netscape "invented" javascript and the cookie...
Isn't this more appropriate as a copyright?
I appended the parent to a letter addressed to the editorial staff of Recording Magazine and Electronic Musician Magazine:
6 21 1
Are you folks following the legislation and debates regarding the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA)? It (slowly) appears that the only practical, rational motivation for the act is to curtail the availability of digital recording devices outside of the studio system. A careful reading of the bill will show that it has the power to cripple the recording capabilities of all digital devices. Some of us computer geeks are beginning to think that CBDTPA is a last ditch effort by the established production houses to avert the threat created by the dual availability of professional quality authoring equipment (digital recording) and open distribution channels (the internet.)
An archival source of CBDTA related material is:
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/cbdtpa/
The above site has the text of the bill online. The clincher is Section 5:
"SEC. 5. PROHIBITION ON SHIPMENT IN INTERSTATE COMMERCE OF NONCONFORMING DIGITAL MEDIA DEVICES.
(a) IN GENERAL. -- A manufacturer, importer, or seller of digital media devices may not --
(1) sell, or offer for sale, in interstate commerce, or
(2) cause to be transported in, or in a manner affecting, interstate commerce,
a digital medial device unless the device includes and utilizes standard security technologies that adhere to the security system standards adopted under section 3."
slashdot.org is a good place to keep abreast of the issues, though as yet only a small percentage of the members seem to be aware of the depth of the threat from CBDTA. A recent article is:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/19/221
I include a discussion from one of the slashdot members below, the perspective of an independent film maker:
[parent appended]
Yea, I guess that's true for most companies that just use the internet to serve ads and take orders, but who care about innovation in that market?
I can't even get past the first paragraph. He defines the internet as the browser, and the browser as (clearly) IE. If I wanted to "innovate" a network application, I certainly wouldn't stuff it in a browser...
I haven't thought about this enough, but something is seriously wrong with the ground rules. The purpose of patent law is to motivate private industry to develop inventions for the public good. Patent law is created and maintained by we the public for our benefit, by definition. Here there is some notion that an invention can itself become part of the public, which sounds like someone (besides just me) is confused. That is, something that was not someone has become someone by human invention. !.
This is a collision of a several loaded issues in one place. The two most obvious to me are the "right to life vs. right to choose" issue, and the "capitalist vs. socialist" debate. The "capitalist vs. socialist" issue is not so obvious so I will address it first.
Suppose we succeeded in defining "life" and decided that life shall not be patentable. Then private industry would stop working on all life containing products, and the public would loose the benefit of oil eating bacteria and similar products. But these products may be so compelling that the public does not want to loose these benefits. So let the public develop them. Furthermore, let the public nationalize inventions surfaced by private industry that encompass "life." Practically speaking, this would mean an absorption by the government of most biotech talent, wherein all research and results would naturally be in the public domain. This may well be in the best interest of the public. There is a qualitative difference between the benefit of a light bulb or a hyperlink and that of a humouse.
Nationalizing biotech would also defuse the "ownership" issue and let people concentrate on the more pertinent issue of ethics.
Which brings me to the "right to life vs. right to choose" issue. If the public cannot decide on the entity status of a human embryo, how on earth is the patent office going to make decisions regarding the property ownership of modifications of the embryo? But then again, perhaps the current status of the law is that an embryo is not an entity. But apparently it is possible for an industry to invent it into an entity, though hopefully not a human entity? Addressing this in the context of patent law is fascinating and insane.
The sign was not the art; the performance of planning and installing the sign was intentionally art. The installation was self consciously filmed as an artistic "event", a form of conceptual art. By getting members of the Los Angeles art community to agree that the performance was art, it thereby became actual and authentic art. It's all sort of suspicious. I think it's actually marketing or sales...
What do you think you are, some kind of Jedi knight, waving your hand around like that?
Microsoft can choose to provide software components using several different approaches. The notion of requiring an entire program is rather novel, and first surfaced with Internet Explorer. Before that time components were physically deployed as DLLs. The components provided with IE are also DLLs, of course, but they are not packaged for independent deployment.
Consider choosing to depend on a single simple DLL like comdlg32. I link dynamically and include comdlg32 in the installation process. Under XP if that version is already there nothing happens; if it isn't there is side-by-sides. Under earlier Windows if it is already there it gets overwritten. Either way, comdlg32.dll is installed as a shareable library. Now if another program is also installed that uses comdlg32 the same thing happens. But no bloat has occured -- both programs use the same DLL and load one instance when both programs are executing at the same time.
The HTML rendering components of IE could also be packaged for independent deployment, if Microsoft desired. No bloat or configuration problems would occur. But Microsoft intentionally changed their deployment model with the development of IE. The fact that the physical model is so convoluted is not an excuse, it is a symptom of anti-competitive practice.
True, but they don't really appear crooked either -- they just appear sort of stupid. Hence the parent comment. But they aren't really stupid at all, they are actually very capable WRT American politics. American politics is not about correctness, or ethics, or intelligence, it is about collecting power. Politicians make only a token effort at appearing sincere when they deal with constituents. If one of our politicians were to write an honest description of their insights into capturing power in American politics, I'm certain it would read as well as the response of Dr. Nuñez.
It's far easier to be truly sincere than to appear sincere when you are not. I'm sure our representatives are just as capable in their own way.
This is a little off topic, but what if this concern and legislation is a symptom of the death of an "industry" that existed as a short term fluke? Legislative bodies should try to take a long term perspective on the matter so that the law books don't end up looking too silly.
Historically the benefit provided by media industries was provided by a "cottage" industry of local and traveling artisans: minstrels, acting troops, vaudville, etc. The expensive technology of recording and reproduction created a few production enterprises in the mid 20th to service the new market for reproduced performance. The means of production were owned by the studios, though the content was being provided by modern versions of the original artisans. The production / marketing centers created a notion of "elite" artisans, however, which certainly has crushed a lot of talent.
Now, however, the means of production are moving back into the hands of the artisans. A talented artist does not need a production company to produce an excellent recorded work. It is only a consequence that the means of production are also a good means of reproduction, which is causing the media companies this first set of problems. The true problem will come when people (known by our government as "consumers") rediscover their appreciation for artistic authenticity over cynically marketed fame. The media companies will be transformed into mass advertising agencies for the talent that captures the greatest net share on it's own.
Wherein copyright law will revert back to the original intent -- to protect the interests of the true creator. And all these strange interim laws and machinations will amuse future historians.
the people who work at the patent office.
Of course they let this through to make a point
about the patent process itself. Obviously things
have to be fixed from the outside.
Come to think of it, this is actually a good act, from the perspective of open source developers. Creating technical barriers without creating legal barriers will end up stoking exactly the kind of innovation the RIAA probably does not want. There will be a whole new product category for media resamplers, and you can bet the quality of the D/A/D chain will improve to keep up.
From the act text: "Only someone who violates the law "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" can be convicted" It will always be easy for programmers to build systems that resample and re-encode. As long as we don't try to make money off the result we are not even targets for this act.
Any "media" has to be converted into the analog domain in order to be useful. The degradation caused by resampling will not be anywhere near as bad as that of, for instance, converting CD quality digital into MP3 digital. At most this would force people to resample, won't it? As long as there is a programmable device to regenerate the analog, the programmers are still in control. This may force MP3 player mfgrs to have a prohibitive codec, but then we can just use Sony Clie's and similar portable systems to reproduce the media.