Slashdot Mirror

These things have been hacked all up and down already, and this is one of the most content-poor accounts I have seen. Here are some better resources:

• eGroups thinknic and thinknic-tech
• The (Unofficial) NIC FAQ-O-Matic
• Kaikun
• NICHacker.com
• BICNic.com

I've gotten one of these myself (littlelarry.capnbry.net, currently offline), pulled it apart, soldered another power connector on, and added a hard drive. The Cyrix PR266 is pretty underpowered, but it runs linux like a scalded dog.

I kinda noticed that when I was posting but wasn't 100% sure I remembered the syllable counts. Now that you mention it, flipping through his sample poems, there are a bunch of them that are off by a syllable or two in various lines. I thought haiku's were all 5-7-5 in terms of syllables per line. But I have vague recollection that there are more flexible forms; are they still legitimately called haiku? An article found via Google suggests so, but while doing, describes the primacy of the 5-7-5 form. Here's another definition of haiku, pretty interesting.

The syllable patterns in the "haiku" listed in his book (p163-166) and website have the syllabic patterns:
5-5-5, 4-7-6, 5-5-6, 4-5-4, 6-5-5, 4-6-7
Another list of poems from his website includes haiku with syllabes:
5-6-5, 3-4-5, 4-4-4, 3-5-4, 5-8-5, 6-4-7, 4-6-7, 5-6-6

Fourteen haiku, all hand selected from hundreds or thousands of presumably worse ones, and not even one 5-7-5 haiku!

What's even more troubling is the potential manipulation of the input. The poem I quoted was generated "after reading poems by Ray Kurzweil and Wendy Dennis." What isn't disclosed in the book AFAICT, but is mentioned on the Cybernetic Poet website is the background of Wendy Dennis, who is one of the two authors fed in to that poem I first quoted:
Wendy Dennis (KCAT Research Analyst) organized an
effort to gather files of poetry from 16 contemporary
poets. Files of poetry from 20 classical poets were
provided by The Poetry Archives. Wendy was also the
project's Poet Personality Designer, and designed the
100 poet personalities that are included with the
program.

This implies that there could be at least two other potential factors that make the poems "look intelligent" here:
1) the particular pieces of poetry fed in to the program are carefully hand-selected to generate human-looking output
2) the poetry fed into the system could actually be *composed* in an optimal way so to produce interesting-looking output (output that owes more to the data entered than the code written)

Well, thanks for the conversational spur to look into this. It's been educational.


Artificial thought --
They call it intelligence;
I'm still better. Hah!

(Oops, forgot the nature theme to make it truly traditional.)

Winters' discontent --
a stark new competitor
arises. Shot down!

--LP


P.S. The above post was created by a wetware neural network going by the handle LinuxParanoid, an engineer by training with little education in poetry. The subject did learn how to write haiku in middle school but had no further education on the subject and has never pursued haiku as a hobby. Both haiku were written in under 2 minutes each, with the subject having written maybe one haiku in the last ten years on a lark.

The approach you outline with Samba is one we are considering for a future release of the Faximum Messaging Server. Your proposal of using a web page to provide the fax addressing information is a good one and one we have thought of. The only problem is that it is a two-step process: (1) the user prints to the special Samba fax pseudo-printer and (2) the user hits the appropriate page on the fax server to provide the addressing information. And if the user forgets the second step his fax languishes on the fax server forever.

The approach we take with FMS is, IMHO, easier for the user.

The FMS Print Driver enables users to "print to fax" (in the same manner as your Samba approach) but then a dialog box pops up asking for the addressing information (name, company, fax number). This info is converted into an email address of the form (Person_Name/Company_Name/Phone_Number@fax.your.co m) and then MAPI is used to invoke your email client of choice with the above address already in the To: field and the TIFF produced by the FMS Print Driver already attached.

This requires almost the same amount of software on the client side as your Samba approach (i.e. FMS Print Driver as compared to a PostScript print driver) but has the added benefit of (a) doing the print-to-fax conversion on the client side so it can be previewed, and (b) popping up a dialog box so the user need not remember and manually invoke the second step of running a web browser to specify the addressing information.

The approach you outline with Samba is one we are considering for a future release of the Faximum Messaging Server. Your proposal of using a web page to provide the fax addressing information is a good one and one we have thought of. The only problem is that it is a two-step process: (1) the user prints to the special Samba fax pseudo-printer and (2) the user hits the appropriate page on the fax server to provide the addressing information. And if the user forgets the second step his fax languishes on the fax server forever.

The approach we take with FMS is, IMHO, easier for the user.

The FMS Print Driver enables users to "print to fax" (in the same manner as your Samba approach) but then a dialog box pops up asking for the addressing information (name, company, fax number). This info is converted into an email address of the form (Person_Name/Company_Name/Phone_Number@fax.your.co m) and then MAPI is used to invoke your email client of choice with the above address already in the To: field and the TIFF produced by the FMS Print Driver already attached.

This requires almost the same amount of software on the client side as your Samba approach (i.e. FMS Print Driver as compared to a PostScript print driver) but has the added benefit of (a) doing the print-to-fax conversion on the client side so it can be previewed, and (b) popping up a dialog box so the user need not remember and manually invoke the second step of running a web browser to specify the addressing information.

P.S. - OCR on fax resolution images (not to mention handwritten coversheets) is so hit and miss that it is probably not even worth trying. Manually routing faxes using a browser to view the fax (see our manual routing demo) is very speedy and much much more reliable.

P.S. - OCR on fax resolution images (not to mention handwritten coversheets) is so hit and miss that it is probably not even worth trying. Manually routing faxes using a browser to view the fax (see our manual routing demo) is very speedy and much much more reliable.

If I might be so bold as to suggest you try our company's product: the Faximum Messaging Server (FMS).

Consider:

• Its architecture is a generation ahead of traditional Client/Server fax products. Rather than requiring its own proprietary client for Windows it utilises your existing email infrastructure. Received faxes are converted by FMS into email messages and delivered to the same inbox as your email messages. Outbound faxes are merely email messages addressed to (for example) Jane_Doe/ACME_Company/1-604-926-8182@fax.your.com
  

  
  If you want to fax from something like Microsoft Word you can use the FMS Print Driver which allows you to "print to fax" which creates a TIFF file and uses MAPI to invoke your favourite email client with the TIFF file already attached.
  
  

• Although FMS is commercial software it is free to individuals for personal non-commercial use and for organizational or commercial use it starts as low as $149 for a two-user licence ($1,295 for a 50-user licence). That compares very favourably with the commercial alternatives. And as for the "free" fax software out there, what is your time worth (witness the comments elsewhere about the challenges surrounding some of the "free" packages)?
  

Thank you for your tolerance of this commercial message and please visit http://www.faximum.com/fms/ for more details.

If I might be so bold as to suggest you try our company's product: the Faximum Messaging Server (FMS).

Consider:

• Its architecture is a generation ahead of traditional Client/Server fax products. Rather than requiring its own proprietary client for Windows it utilises your existing email infrastructure. Received faxes are converted by FMS into email messages and delivered to the same inbox as your email messages. Outbound faxes are merely email messages addressed to (for example) Jane_Doe/ACME_Company/1-604-926-8182@fax.your.com
  

  
  If you want to fax from something like Microsoft Word you can use the FMS Print Driver which allows you to "print to fax" which creates a TIFF file and uses MAPI to invoke your favourite email client with the TIFF file already attached.
  
  

• Although FMS is commercial software it is free to individuals for personal non-commercial use and for organizational or commercial use it starts as low as $149 for a two-user licence ($1,295 for a 50-user licence). That compares very favourably with the commercial alternatives. And as for the "free" fax software out there, what is your time worth (witness the comments elsewhere about the challenges surrounding some of the "free" packages)?
  

Thank you for your tolerance of this commercial message and please visit http://www.faximum.com/fms/ for more details.