It's not the kids fault for being idiots and talking ot people online that they never knew and then going out behind their parents backs and getting molested.
I know this was meant to be sarcastic, but there are a number of factual errors here which should be pointed out in the interest of accuracy.
As a piece of background, it might be handy to know that I've worked with a number of adult survivors of childhood abuse. My wife has worked with many more than I. In every case we've dealt with, none were abused by a "people [...] that they never knew".
Research (e.g. by the WHO) shows that this is not isolated. The common case is that a child is abused by a male[1], a trusted individual known to them, and usually in a position of authority (often a parent or other relative, neighbour, teacher, priest etc). Furthermore, the child most at risk for this kind of abuse is one who does not have a sufficiently caring and intimate family life. Abusers prey on loneliness and provide the intimacy that children need, albeit in a more damaging form.
Children being abused by the "stranger on the street" (or on the net, for that matter) is extremely rare. Naturally, it gets reported a lot when it does happen.
The moral of the story is that if the protection of children is the desired outcome, looking for paedophiles "out there" is precisely the wrong thing to do.
[1] BTW, in case you're curious why there's a sex disparity here, it might be helpful to know that females tend to abuse in different ways. Women (usually mothers) are more likely to be physically or emotionally abusive than sexually abusive. It does happen, but it's rare. Also, while men tend to physically abuse more, women tend to physically abuse worse, because they tend to use weapons. (Brooms, spoons, belts etc.)
Jesus, there are almost half a million political prisoners in the USA, mostly blacks jailed for non-violent drug crimes to appease an unworkable political stance regarding drug abuse.
Where are the Slashdot articles about them?
They're not geeks or gamers, so they don't matter. Get with the program, already.
Anyhow, speed will be the deciding factor on this one.
No, flexibility will be the deciding factor, closely followed by speed of development. Speed of execution won't make a huge difference, because the judges are going to throw in a test case so large and complex that no program can find the "optimal" sequence in the given wall time on the test machine. So the winner will be the program which can make the best use of the time available.
The winner will use a set of optimisation techniques (from simple transformations to expanding the string out into decorated characters and re-encoding), and will be able to combine these techniques seamlessly. And this will be coded in three days.
This is not a test for a systems programming language like C. This is a test for a language in which you can write complex decision logic quickly.
While that's partly true, it won't help you. The task is designed for functional languages, and it shows. Functional languages have algebraic data types and pattern matching built in. In C you'd have to implement this yourself, plus all the code required for memory management and write the optimiser, all in three days.
That's why I predict O'Caml will win. Of all the languages which have native support for precisely this kind of task, it's the one that also has the support for beating the time limit.
I predict that the winner will probably be O'Caml, and for one reason only: it will beat the time limit. Moreover, this will have little to do with the speed of the O'Caml implementation.
Your program has to complete within a given wall time (not CPU time). This is supplied as a command-line argument and environment variable. The winner will be the tool which can stop computing before the time is up and produce the output. The winning program will be one that iteratively improves the input string, but is monitored by another thread which stops the optimiser thread when the time is almost up, then grabs the best solution so far and performs the output.
O'Caml just happens to have good built-in primitives to write this kind of "interrupt the thread when the time is up and let me know what you did" computation.
I know that what you wrote was a tangential editorial comment, so I'm not going to pretend that you meant it as a complete argument. However, I'd like to concentrate on one part:
Closing, I ask "what if..." there is a crack down such that code, crypto, foreign-films, unapproved websites, certain books, and such become NO-MORE. What happens next?
That's simple. They'll get taken away and nobody will stop them, not even gun owners.
Guns are supposedly there to protect the citizenry from an oppressive governments which violate human rights, but in reality, when the US has had oppressive governments which violate human rights (certainly they're violating human rights now), having guns didn't make any difference. Having an armed citizenry didn't protect those persecuted by McCarthy, it didn't protect 2600 Magazine, it didn't protect Kevin Mitnick, it is not protecting Dmity Sklyarov today and it will not protect the thousands more being denied fundamental civil rights in the name of the "war on drugs". That's because gun owners, on the whole, will only mobilise if there's a threat to gun ownership, and will certainly not mobilise in favour of "communists", "hackers", "drug users" or whoever the PR machine is painting as this week's bad guy.
Gun owners, in general, don't believe in civil rights. They believe in a civil right. This is why I am not an anarchist.
"Why don't people get as bent out of shape when the other Twenty-Six (?) Amendments are violated (e.g. Second Amendment???)"
In a word: karma.
One argument I constantly hear from gun lobbyists is that guns are necessary to protect the citizenry from an oppressive government. I don't believe them. The United States government has, over the years, perpetrated some of the worst acts of civil rights violations in the Western world, and the gun lobby has done nothing unless those "violations" had something to do with gun control. That's not championing rights, that's championing a tautology. (We need guns to protect our guns.)
Look at what happened to foreign nationals during WW1. Look at what happened to political dissidents during the McCarthy era. Look at what happened during the Vietnam war. Look at what is happening today in the name of the so-called "war on drugs". Look at Dmitry Sklyarov, for heaven's sake.
Why do people not get so bent out of shape when the "second amendment is violated"? Because the second amendment, and those championing "gun rights", have never protected their rights and they never will.
Out of interest, what was the legal situation there? Were you doing it under a court order, or doing it (illegally, but with, ahem, "moral justification") prior to obtaining a court order, or was it perfectly legal for you to do it?
As I recall (and my memory is kinda hazy here, as I wasn't doing any investigating), the hard drive on which the file was found was obtained by a search and seizure warrant. By the time we got hold of it, I think we were well into the discovery phase.
Bear in mind: IANAL. I just worked for Ls at the time. I can't even remember what the case was (or even if I ever knew). They all kinda run together after a few months.
How is it possible to love something and at the same time hate an integral part of it?
Ever heard the song Anthem from the musical Chess? It may help to know the context. The Russian chess champion is defecting to the west, and he is asked by a journalist how he can leave his country. This is his reply.
I used to work for a certain investigation-oriented agency of the Australian government. Once we needed to break into a password-protected Excel spreadsheet in order to try to prove that the owner was up to no good. We didn't bother paying for a tool to do it; I just downloaded a free tool off the net. I like to think I saved the Australian taxpayer some money, there.
There is a rather large room at Feature Animation where the Ink & Paint department works...and works.
You're right. I wasn't very careful with what I said. What I meant to say is that the job of cel inking and painting, along with the high cost of error, high incidence of error and high boredom, was no longer necessary.
Obviously I did not mean to say that the CAPS software works without operators.:-) It is also true that they are called "ink and paint" even though they don't touch physical ink or physical paint.
For the record, I've never seen CAPS in operation or read any specs. I'm going by the way that similar tools (e.g. Animo) work.
They've already thought of that. They are covering themselves from that possibility by using the only thing more powerful than money: public relations.
Havenco is planning to host a number of sites gratis, such as "information about repressive regimes, corporate malfeasance, corrupt politicians etc". The idea is that HavenCo will try very hard to provide a net benefit to humanity. If England ever does pull the plug, there will be a lot of public outrage.
In fact, during the production of Beauty and the Beast, the animators painted a small triangle in a dark skin shade on the cheeks of Belle that would "guide" CAPS to apply the cheek blush coloring at the right spot.
Think for a moment how you'd implement that. It's not as amazing as you might think. (Bear in mind that I have no idea how the CAPS system specifically works, so I'm guessing here.) I'd get the CAPS system to extract the animator's drawn triangle as a separate layer, then fill in Belle's cheeks in the appropriate model colour without that triangle. Then blur the blush (introducing alpha), do some careful stuff to make sure the blush doesn't escape Belle's face, then overlay.
Remember that CAPS is more than just an inker and painter. It's a full compositing system, complete with virtual multiplane camera. Quite a nice system, actually.
Personally, what I really want Disney to do with the computers they have now is to create backgrounds that seamlessly "blend" with the character animation so you don't have the jarring difference between the characters and the computer-generated background.
Yes, Dreamworks Feature Animation is much better at this. Take a look at the town backgrounds during the chase sequence at the start of The Road to El Dorado if you want to see it done seamlessly.
Has Disney reached the point (at least since the early 1990's) they are trying to do animated features that have most of the feel of traditional cel animation but with heavy computer assistance?
Disney Feature Animation's main concern is to get the look they want for the lowest price or highest productivity.
Let's take CAPS for example. Disney asked Pixar to write CAPS to replace their ink and paint department because traditional cel ink and paint was a huge resource drain. Traditional ink and paint is a manager's worst nightmare: a noncreative department full of people doing a boring and repetitive job, but where the cost of fixing a mistake was huge (because the entire cel (or group of cels) would have to be re-copied and re-painted). To make things worse, mistakes happened often because it the job was tricky as well as boring. For example: using more overlaid cels would often save work (less to animate, less to paint etc if only a small part of the image was moving), but painting them was harder because cels have an intrinsic colour which meant that you had to paint overlaid cels with slightly lighter colours to compensate. Painters often forgot which cel depth they were working at and made costly mistakes as a result.
CAPS meant that this entire department could be axed. Moreover, it added some more flexibility. The final sequence could be tweaked at will, say, if the director wanted that shadow a bit darker. In the end, it made what they were already doing cheaper and easier.
The bottom line is that Disney Feature Animation won't touch a computer unless it a) makes it easier to do something they're already doing without losing quality, or b) allows them to do something for artistic reasons that they otherwise would not have been able to do.
Well, part of the CA's last campaign was "Vote us because we're good Christians, and We'll get God back into Canada.
We have an equivalent (Christian Democratic Coalition, run by the ever-outspoken Fred Nile), but it's not very mainstream.
Do you elect your Senators?
Yes. Strangely, we use the same names as the US for our chambers ("house of representatives" and "senate") despite having a pretty standard Westminster parliament.
Don't kid yourself. While they're not as socially conservative as the Republicans yet, they are headed that way. It's just wishful thinking to say otherwise.
Maybe. The Liberal Party is always conscious of differentiating themselves from One Nation, so what you suggest would only happen once One Nation's fifteen minutes are up. This may come quite soon.
As for motive, it would only happen if the National Party went under; the Liberals would be politically obliged to pick up their supporter base. This may also come quite soon.
the "Liberals"; similar to the US Republicans but more socially conservative
Australia doesn't have a mainstream party which is more socially conservative than the US Republicans. It just sometimes seems that way.:-)
The Australian Liberal Party is actually much closer to a European "conservative" party: close to the US Democrats, but a little more conservative. The closest thing we have to the Republican party in Australia is the National Party, whose support is mostly from rural areas. The problem is that when the Liberal Party is in power, it's almost always in coalition with the National Party, so coalition governments often pass National Party-esque laws such as this one.
Why should this be fairer than the approach taken in the shootout?
I don't object to the solutions so much, since he is taking submissions. I object to the problems, which are all trivial. Floating point performance may be the last thing that you care about. Personally, I find performance in computing Ackermann's function slightly less important.
Pseudoknot is real-world, CPU-intensive and hard. Yes, it's not a complete benchmark suite. I believe that I said as much. My main point is that shootouts based on the ability to solve trivial toy problems are useless.
Off the top of my head, these are the sorts of things I want to see in a "real world" benchmark suite:
MPEG compression or decompression.
Something to do with string matching, such as shortest edit script (diff) or shortest common superstring.
Something to do with structure manipulation. Perhaps a compiler optimisation pass, such as partial redundancy elimination.
A nontrivial alpha-beta or A* search problem, like chess solving.
Read the whole comment, then reply. Particularly the bit where I mentioned that this infringement was an honest mistake, rather than a deliberate attempt to infringe.
I see no mention of how long it took him to code any of these...
Or how difficult it would be to fix a bug or add a new feature. Or how robustly it would perform in the presence of other kinds of failure (e.g. unexpected input, hardware failure etc). Or how easy or difficult it would be for a larger group of people to work on the same program. Or how easy it would be to adapt his programs to work with other pre-existing programs.
A much fairer contest is the pseudoknot benchmark. The idea is to take one real-world task (not a partial task like matrix multiplication), and get experienced programmers to write a program to solve the problem in whatever is the most natural way for some language. The results are then benchmarked on equivalent hardware.
Of course it's not representative of all programs. Pseudoknot is a floating point-intensive search problem, which is not the sort of thing that I do most of the time. Still, it's a better example than a self-confessed beginner trying out toy problems.
They were right to defend their trademark. The way they did so, even if it's the usual way it's done in Germany, sucks like a singularity.
The right thing to do, and this is what would happen in most countries, is to bring the infringement to the infringer's attention first. If they fail to comply, then sue. Everything that Dr Sattler has said indicates that this was an honest mistake and he is perfectly prepared to change KIllustrator's name to avoid the infringement. If Adobe's lawyers had taken this course, that would have been that. There would have been some stories on the usual suspect weblog sites, possibly some flamage, but no real hurt done, just some inconvenience for the KDE folks.
Unfortunately, the lawyers chose to fight first. I accept that this is the way things are usually done in Germany, but I must say that I was shocked to find this factoid out. Germany's legal system may find this behaviour "right and proper", but I think most of the rest of us disagree.
I would never infringe on someone's intellectual property on purpose (unless I decided to engage in civil disobedience for some reason, but that hasn't happened so far). However, in my country, if that happens, I know I'll get a chance to fix my mistake. Dr Sattler did not get that chance. Needless to say, I wouldn't like to be an Open Source developer in Germany.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this was meant to be sarcastic, but there are a number of factual errors here which should be pointed out in the interest of accuracy.
As a piece of background, it might be handy to know that I've worked with a number of adult survivors of childhood abuse. My wife has worked with many more than I. In every case we've dealt with, none were abused by a "people [...] that they never knew".
Research (e.g. by the WHO) shows that this is not isolated. The common case is that a child is abused by a male[1], a trusted individual known to them, and usually in a position of authority (often a parent or other relative, neighbour, teacher, priest etc). Furthermore, the child most at risk for this kind of abuse is one who does not have a sufficiently caring and intimate family life. Abusers prey on loneliness and provide the intimacy that children need, albeit in a more damaging form.
Children being abused by the "stranger on the street" (or on the net, for that matter) is extremely rare. Naturally, it gets reported a lot when it does happen.
The moral of the story is that if the protection of children is the desired outcome, looking for paedophiles "out there" is precisely the wrong thing to do.
[1] BTW, in case you're curious why there's a sex disparity here, it might be helpful to know that females tend to abuse in different ways. Women (usually mothers) are more likely to be physically or emotionally abusive than sexually abusive. It does happen, but it's rare. Also, while men tend to physically abuse more, women tend to physically abuse worse, because they tend to use weapons. (Brooms, spoons, belts etc.)
They're not geeks or gamers, so they don't matter. Get with the program, already.
No, flexibility will be the deciding factor, closely followed by speed of development. Speed of execution won't make a huge difference, because the judges are going to throw in a test case so large and complex that no program can find the "optimal" sequence in the given wall time on the test machine. So the winner will be the program which can make the best use of the time available.
The winner will use a set of optimisation techniques (from simple transformations to expanding the string out into decorated characters and re-encoding), and will be able to combine these techniques seamlessly. And this will be coded in three days.
This is not a test for a systems programming language like C. This is a test for a language in which you can write complex decision logic quickly.
Java does not have pattern matching, unless you think method dispatch is pattern matching. :-)
Having said that, Java would be a good general-purpose language to solve this problem in. I don't like your chances given the three day limit, though.
While that's partly true, it won't help you. The task is designed for functional languages, and it shows. Functional languages have algebraic data types and pattern matching built in. In C you'd have to implement this yourself, plus all the code required for memory management and write the optimiser, all in three days.
That's why I predict O'Caml will win. Of all the languages which have native support for precisely this kind of task, it's the one that also has the support for beating the time limit.
I predict that the winner will probably be O'Caml, and for one reason only: it will beat the time limit. Moreover, this will have little to do with the speed of the O'Caml implementation.
Your program has to complete within a given wall time (not CPU time). This is supplied as a command-line argument and environment variable. The winner will be the tool which can stop computing before the time is up and produce the output. The winning program will be one that iteratively improves the input string, but is monitored by another thread which stops the optimiser thread when the time is almost up, then grabs the best solution so far and performs the output.
O'Caml just happens to have good built-in primitives to write this kind of "interrupt the thread when the time is up and let me know what you did" computation.
I know that what you wrote was a tangential editorial comment, so I'm not going to pretend that you meant it as a complete argument. However, I'd like to concentrate on one part:
That's simple. They'll get taken away and nobody will stop them, not even gun owners.
Guns are supposedly there to protect the citizenry from an oppressive governments which violate human rights, but in reality, when the US has had oppressive governments which violate human rights (certainly they're violating human rights now), having guns didn't make any difference. Having an armed citizenry didn't protect those persecuted by McCarthy, it didn't protect 2600 Magazine, it didn't protect Kevin Mitnick, it is not protecting Dmity Sklyarov today and it will not protect the thousands more being denied fundamental civil rights in the name of the "war on drugs". That's because gun owners, on the whole, will only mobilise if there's a threat to gun ownership, and will certainly not mobilise in favour of "communists", "hackers", "drug users" or whoever the PR machine is painting as this week's bad guy.
Gun owners, in general, don't believe in civil rights. They believe in a civil right. This is why I am not an anarchist.
In a word: karma.
One argument I constantly hear from gun lobbyists is that guns are necessary to protect the citizenry from an oppressive government. I don't believe them. The United States government has, over the years, perpetrated some of the worst acts of civil rights violations in the Western world, and the gun lobby has done nothing unless those "violations" had something to do with gun control. That's not championing rights, that's championing a tautology. (We need guns to protect our guns.)
Look at what happened to foreign nationals during WW1. Look at what happened to political dissidents during the McCarthy era. Look at what happened during the Vietnam war. Look at what is happening today in the name of the so-called "war on drugs". Look at Dmitry Sklyarov, for heaven's sake.
Why do people not get so bent out of shape when the "second amendment is violated"? Because the second amendment, and those championing "gun rights", have never protected their rights and they never will.
So you'll excuse me if I feel no sympathy.
Or "weenies" spelled backwards.
As I recall (and my memory is kinda hazy here, as I wasn't doing any investigating), the hard drive on which the file was found was obtained by a search and seizure warrant. By the time we got hold of it, I think we were well into the discovery phase.
Bear in mind: IANAL. I just worked for Ls at the time. I can't even remember what the case was (or even if I ever knew). They all kinda run together after a few months.
Ever heard the song Anthem from the musical Chess? It may help to know the context. The Russian chess champion is defecting to the west, and he is asked by a journalist how he can leave his country. This is his reply.
I used to work for a certain investigation-oriented agency of the Australian government. Once we needed to break into a password-protected Excel spreadsheet in order to try to prove that the owner was up to no good. We didn't bother paying for a tool to do it; I just downloaded a free tool off the net. I like to think I saved the Australian taxpayer some money, there.
This article suggests to me that Linux is to OS kernels what Emacs is to text editing, too. Or it will be very soon.
You're right. I wasn't very careful with what I said. What I meant to say is that the job of cel inking and painting, along with the high cost of error, high incidence of error and high boredom, was no longer necessary.
Obviously I did not mean to say that the CAPS software works without operators. :-) It is also true that they are called "ink and paint" even though they don't touch physical ink or physical paint.
For the record, I've never seen CAPS in operation or read any specs. I'm going by the way that similar tools (e.g. Animo) work.
They've already thought of that. They are covering themselves from that possibility by using the only thing more powerful than money: public relations.
Havenco is planning to host a number of sites gratis, such as "information about repressive regimes, corporate malfeasance, corrupt politicians etc". The idea is that HavenCo will try very hard to provide a net benefit to humanity. If England ever does pull the plug, there will be a lot of public outrage.
That's the theory, anyway.
Think for a moment how you'd implement that. It's not as amazing as you might think. (Bear in mind that I have no idea how the CAPS system specifically works, so I'm guessing here.) I'd get the CAPS system to extract the animator's drawn triangle as a separate layer, then fill in Belle's cheeks in the appropriate model colour without that triangle. Then blur the blush (introducing alpha), do some careful stuff to make sure the blush doesn't escape Belle's face, then overlay.
Remember that CAPS is more than just an inker and painter. It's a full compositing system, complete with virtual multiplane camera. Quite a nice system, actually.
Yes, Dreamworks Feature Animation is much better at this. Take a look at the town backgrounds during the chase sequence at the start of The Road to El Dorado if you want to see it done seamlessly.
Disney Feature Animation's main concern is to get the look they want for the lowest price or highest productivity.
Let's take CAPS for example. Disney asked Pixar to write CAPS to replace their ink and paint department because traditional cel ink and paint was a huge resource drain. Traditional ink and paint is a manager's worst nightmare: a noncreative department full of people doing a boring and repetitive job, but where the cost of fixing a mistake was huge (because the entire cel (or group of cels) would have to be re-copied and re-painted). To make things worse, mistakes happened often because it the job was tricky as well as boring. For example: using more overlaid cels would often save work (less to animate, less to paint etc if only a small part of the image was moving), but painting them was harder because cels have an intrinsic colour which meant that you had to paint overlaid cels with slightly lighter colours to compensate. Painters often forgot which cel depth they were working at and made costly mistakes as a result.
CAPS meant that this entire department could be axed. Moreover, it added some more flexibility. The final sequence could be tweaked at will, say, if the director wanted that shadow a bit darker. In the end, it made what they were already doing cheaper and easier.
The bottom line is that Disney Feature Animation won't touch a computer unless it a) makes it easier to do something they're already doing without losing quality, or b) allows them to do something for artistic reasons that they otherwise would not have been able to do.
We have an equivalent (Christian Democratic Coalition, run by the ever-outspoken Fred Nile), but it's not very mainstream.
Yes. Strangely, we use the same names as the US for our chambers ("house of representatives" and "senate") despite having a pretty standard Westminster parliament.
Maybe. The Liberal Party is always conscious of differentiating themselves from One Nation, so what you suggest would only happen once One Nation's fifteen minutes are up. This may come quite soon.
As for motive, it would only happen if the National Party went under; the Liberals would be politically obliged to pick up their supporter base. This may also come quite soon.
Australia doesn't have a mainstream party which is more socially conservative than the US Republicans. It just sometimes seems that way. :-)
The Australian Liberal Party is actually much closer to a European "conservative" party: close to the US Democrats, but a little more conservative. The closest thing we have to the Republican party in Australia is the National Party, whose support is mostly from rural areas. The problem is that when the Liberal Party is in power, it's almost always in coalition with the National Party, so coalition governments often pass National Party-esque laws such as this one.
I don't object to the solutions so much, since he is taking submissions. I object to the problems, which are all trivial. Floating point performance may be the last thing that you care about. Personally, I find performance in computing Ackermann's function slightly less important.
Pseudoknot is real-world, CPU-intensive and hard. Yes, it's not a complete benchmark suite. I believe that I said as much. My main point is that shootouts based on the ability to solve trivial toy problems are useless.
Off the top of my head, these are the sorts of things I want to see in a "real world" benchmark suite:
I'm sure you have your own pet ideas too.
Read the whole comment, then reply. Particularly the bit where I mentioned that this infringement was an honest mistake, rather than a deliberate attempt to infringe.
Or how difficult it would be to fix a bug or add a new feature. Or how robustly it would perform in the presence of other kinds of failure (e.g. unexpected input, hardware failure etc). Or how easy or difficult it would be for a larger group of people to work on the same program. Or how easy it would be to adapt his programs to work with other pre-existing programs.
A much fairer contest is the pseudoknot benchmark. The idea is to take one real-world task (not a partial task like matrix multiplication), and get experienced programmers to write a program to solve the problem in whatever is the most natural way for some language. The results are then benchmarked on equivalent hardware.
Of course it's not representative of all programs. Pseudoknot is a floating point-intensive search problem, which is not the sort of thing that I do most of the time. Still, it's a better example than a self-confessed beginner trying out toy problems.
They were right to defend their trademark. The way they did so, even if it's the usual way it's done in Germany, sucks like a singularity.
The right thing to do, and this is what would happen in most countries, is to bring the infringement to the infringer's attention first. If they fail to comply, then sue. Everything that Dr Sattler has said indicates that this was an honest mistake and he is perfectly prepared to change KIllustrator's name to avoid the infringement. If Adobe's lawyers had taken this course, that would have been that. There would have been some stories on the usual suspect weblog sites, possibly some flamage, but no real hurt done, just some inconvenience for the KDE folks.
Unfortunately, the lawyers chose to fight first. I accept that this is the way things are usually done in Germany, but I must say that I was shocked to find this factoid out. Germany's legal system may find this behaviour "right and proper", but I think most of the rest of us disagree.
I would never infringe on someone's intellectual property on purpose (unless I decided to engage in civil disobedience for some reason, but that hasn't happened so far). However, in my country, if that happens, I know I'll get a chance to fix my mistake. Dr Sattler did not get that chance. Needless to say, I wouldn't like to be an Open Source developer in Germany.