Slashdot Mirror
Domain: halcyon.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to halcyon.com.
Comments · 63
-
Re:vimVim. How can anybody say otherwise with a straight face?
All the programmers functionality in a tight package, and compatible with vi.
If you only want to learn an editor once, vim is the way to go.
-
Re:Shit, wrong word: Manufacturer
English is a pretty stupid and difficult language
Yeah - damn Chaucer for starting to publish his work BEFORE the great vowel shift. Maybe some day we will get a REAL language that will FACILITATE problem solving, like Loglan, rather than continuing to use the archaic meme-bases that place artificial limits on our conceptual capacity.
At least English is better than Chinese. Ever try spelling in Chinese over the telephone??? Ideogammic languages have REAL problems.
-
Re:One thing I hope...
OK, I'll post the URL for adzapper since I just looked it up.
-
Re:One thing I hope...
OK, I'll post the URL for adzapper since I just looked it up.
-
Re:UNL? Yeah, right!I *was* a localization engineer for 5+ years (thankfully I'm out of that now), and I'm much more positive on this idea than you are... (though I suspect you're right that the UN is the wrong agency to bring off something like this).
Don't think about it as "automatic" translation, it's much more likely to work out as semi-automatic. I expect that the process would be something like this:
- Run automatic converter from natural language to intermediate.
- Have an expert in the intermediate language review the translation.
- Run automatic converters to the target natural languages.
- Have linguists review the output.
The point is that the intermediate language should be designed to be free of the ambiguities that plague language translation. The hope is to minimize or eliminate step (4). A typical localization job is to take software written in English and translate it for a few dozen other countries. It would be a big win if you could get to the point where all the hard stuff is done just *once* instead of repeated over and over again for all of your target languages.
And no, this will not work for poetry or humor, but there's no good way to translate poetry and humor in any case. The idea would be to get it to work with technical, legal, and business language.
By the way, when I was thinking about doing something like this, I figured I would try and use Loglan:
Loglan welcome page -
Re:Sounds possible..Alas, parsing a language is very difficult, bordering on the Turning test for most languages. Since almost every language (national and planned) is ambiguous. (e.g. "beautiful little girls school" or "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.") Plus for most national languages (eg. English, and French) we don't know all the rules of grammar. 6000+ for English with maybe 6000 more unknowen.
It is not likely that we will get good automatic translators until we have machine that a pass the Turning test with ease.
The UN here also reinventing the wheel her, there are many candidates for their purposes.
- Esperanto has a simple grammer and is easy to learn, since it was intended as a Internation Language. Esperanto is ambiguous, but people can handle ambiguity most of the time.
- For well defind nonamgigous languags there are a few Loglan and its desendant Lojban are two, unfortunatly Loglan was not designed to be easy to learn. Actuualy since it was to test the Whorf hypothesis the opposite is closer to being true.
-
Re:What scares me...I believe it was Patton who said, "You don't win wars by dying for your country. You win wars by making the other dumb bastard die for his country."
Finding technology that will make the other dumb bastard die for his country sounds like a good idea to me.
-
Re:Linux this, Linux thatI don't see that coming out untill 2001.
Haven't you heard? Windows 2000 has been delayed due to Y2K problems, and won't ship until the first quarter of 1901?
-
Re:Great computers for kidsI have just turned my old 486 into a router/mail server. My 5 year old daughter went ballistic with me for taking over "her" game box.
Even though this 486 is orders of magnitude slower than our new PII 400, she wanted the old box.
I think that kids would like to have a slow box of their own than to have to share a faster box with others.
-
Brady Bunch?Is this the same amusement park that was featured on a Brady Bunch vacation episode?
-
Re:Looks good...Yes it looks good, but at the risk of drawing the wrath of the true believers...
I think that the Wizard (Lizard?) way is the right way to go. Presuming that this is aimed at new users who are most familiar with Windows in its various flavors, a wizard approach would be comfortable, intuitive, and best of all, repeatable.
I am a bit scared off by the Perl/Tk requirement. It has been my experience that shipping interpreted applications that you have to have version X.Y.Z of package ABC, or else you get all kind of errors.
-
gd trader etiquette
to answer on the ethics of shipping and handling with a e-version of the audience tape.
postage would be absolutely ok. handling I would say absolutely not. the media is reimbursable, the time to burn it, no.
bandwidth? uncharted territory....
shameless promo on...
Kuli Loach
shamless promo off
-
The Transparent SocietyIn David Brin's book, "The Transparent Society," (an excerpt of which appeared in Wired) he basically argues in the same vein as McNealy: There is nothing you can do to prevent companies for acquiring information about you.
Brin argues that there are only two possible futures. In the first, only the corporations have direct access to the information and the techniques with which to mine it. In the second, everybody has access to that information. The first grants us the illusion of privacy but effectively strips us of our freedom-- you can't know our neighbor's kinks but corporations know exactly what floats your boat. The second strips away any illusion of privacy, but grants you the real freedom to decide for yourself the information you take in and put out.
The question now becomes, do we act to ensure this illusory privacy, or do we demand that you and I have access to the same information those with money and power collect about us? Which do you want? A review of The Transparent Society can be found in Business Week.